Page speed is essential! The user experience, bounce rate, search performance, and income all suffer when a website loads slowly.
Google has historically used site speed as a ranking factor. The site speed patent from Google was authorized on February 4, 2014. Following this emphasis on desktop page load time, Google’s Performance Update introduced mobile page speed as a ranking consideration in 2018.
By March 2021, the top search engine hopes to implement its mobile-first indexing transition fully. Therefore, paying particular attention to how quickly your mobile website loads is crucial.
Whether looking at organic search results, site engagement, conversion rate, bounce rate, abandonment, or loyalty, sites that load quickly perform better across various marketing and SEO KPIs.
More page visits, improved conversion rates, and more revenue are just a few of the significant advantages of faster page load time for enhancing website performance.
How to Speed Up Page Loading
Are you eager to learn how to make websites perform faster but need help determining where to begin? We’ve got you covered, so don’t worry. Here are 12 techniques for increasing website performance, enhancing user experience, and boosting SEO rankings.
1. Choose the Right Host
Having the appropriate infrastructure is the first step in page speed optimization. Make sure your web stack is constructed for speed. Use a dedicated, high-performance server to host your website. Shared servers might make your website load more slowly, even if it has a clean design and optimized code. Ensure that you are using the most recent versions of the technology. Also, make sure the caching is effective.
2. Utilize a CDN
Do you want to know how to make web pages load faster? Reduce the distance that data must travel from your server to the user. That makes sense, no? Using a CDN is a straightforward method to accomplish that. A geographically dispersed server network is known as a content delivery network (CDN) (also known as POPs). Together, they expedite the delivery of your site content. A CDN is an excellent way to speed up your website, whether it includes HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, photos, or videos.
3. Compress Your Web Content
GZip is a type of server-side data compression that helps shorten the time it takes for a website to load. In other words, it reduces a set of data for quicker, more effective delivery to a user’s computer. Gzip compression helps your HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files to be smaller. It should be noted that since they are already compressed separately, it does not apply to photographs or videos.
GZip compression is enabled by default on most significant CDNs, so your website is probably already protected as long as you utilize a CDN.
4. Cut Back on HTTP Requests
Reducing the number of HTTP requests a page makes is a very efficient way to speed up page load times. A web browser that accesses a page on a website pings the web server to request the files that make up the page’s content. The browser then renders the content on the page after receiving the required files from the server. The browser sends each file that makes up the page’s content as a separate HTTP request. Your web page will take longer to load due to additional HTTP requests since more files are on the page.
5. Minify JavaScript and CSS
The minification of JavaScript and CSS files is another efficient way to speed up page load times. Code is simplified through the minification process, eliminating extraneous characters, comments, and spaces and using shorter variable and function names. The loading of your page will be faster and easier the less data you have in your code.
6. Simplify Your HTML Codes
Improve the efficiency of your HTML code to speed up websites. The amount of data transferred to consumers is increased by bloated HTML. When you manipulate the DOM, it could affect JavaScript’s performance. You’re dealing with bloated HTML if you discover that your HTML pages have 5,000 or 6,000 lines of code before any content appears on the page (yes, this occurs, even among Fortune 500 businesses).
7. Optimize Images & Other Media
What is one of the most frequent causes of sluggish websites? Images! Huge image sizes. Websites with graphics larger than 1MB and 5MB have been seen. Yikes! Avoid doing that. Large image files significantly slow down the pace of your landing page, making the visitor wait (often in frustration).
Make sure to maintain image quality when you optimize your images. While you want your website to look professional, you also want it to have tiny image files. You can utilize a ton of image optimization plugins with WordPress. We enjoy TinyPNG. Using the technique, we cut the size of all image files on Terakeet by 48%.
8. Organize Your Media Collection
Your media library has probably become clogged with unneeded or out-of-date photographs over time. This only makes your website cluttered. For quicker average page load times, purge your media library of unused photos and other media files.
9. Purge Your Database
Similar to your media collection, over time, unused material like images, files, and other documents can cause your database to grow large. Database optimization involves locating and removing useless and unneeded data from your database. This, in turn, makes it easier for your web hosting server to retrieve information requests.
10. Remove Slow-to-Load JavaScript
Every script, frequently located at different URLs, receives a call when your web pages load in a browser. Before the user may see the page, that queue of scripts must be finished and cleared. Due to their lengthy loading times, render-blocking JavaScript files form quite a bottleneck in these queues and prevent the website’s main content from being rendered.
Web browsers typically load resources in the order they appear in HTML. On occasion, resources that demand a lot of processing power from the user’s device can significantly slow down how the page appears to the user. However, many of these scripts do not require seeing the website first. These scripts could frequently be allowed to run after the page has loaded.
Set your render-blocking JavaScript to load asynchronously to fix this problem, or delete any unnecessary or useless scripts (or unused portions of your JavaScript resources).
11. Use Expires Headers
Expires Headers might speed up page loading for repeat visitors to your website. They give the browser instructions for downloading a file from the server or the browser’s local cache. Shorten the time it takes for a website to load. This decreases both the number of HTTP requests and downloads from the server.
Multiple files can be found on a single page of modern websites. Even huge files increase load time on their own. Additionally, sending each file requires a request to the server, which lengthens the process further.
12. Steer Clear of URL Reroutes
An instruction or technique known as a URL redirects automatically transfers users from one URL to another. A redirect can be implemented in several different ways. The method utilized to keep the forwarding page’s SEO value is a 301 redirect. However, this procedure slows down the speed of your page regardless of the type of redirect because it takes time to switch from one file to another. Therefore, whenever possible, aim to avoid or reduce the number of URL redirects.
