Optimize Website Page Speed
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
We often get asked why you should optimize your website page speed.
You just had a new website built by spending months on its design, layout, and content. But only after you find that your website does not load fast enough. Many web designers and business owners often overlook page speed in their website design and development. This could cost thousands of dollars more to redesign the website for page speed optimization.
Here are some takeaways on how you can speed up your website.
What is Website Page Speed?
Website page speed is the load speed of a particular page on a website. It is also known as Page Load Time or Time to First Byte. It is the time it takes to fully display the full content of that page from the web server on a requesting web browser.
You can test your page speed on Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom Website Speed Test by entering the URL of the page you want to test. Remember to test all pages of your website.
Why Should You Optimize Your Website Page Speed?
Google said in an article on July 10 2018 that speed is now a ranking factor for Google Search and Ads. The rationale behind is simple. When users experience a slow website, they are much less likely visit your website again. This is called bounce rate. More than half of visits are abandoned if a page takes over 3 seconds to load. This will seriously hurt your website conversions and hence your bottom line.
The faster your website loads, the lower will be its bounce rate which is a ranking factor on Google Search ranking. But speeding up your website is not so straightforward because you need to identify what is slowing down your website. This could be some poorly written code, too much JavaScript, too many plugins, too many images, too much content, etc.
Mobile-Friendly Responsive and Speed-optimized Websites
Mobile is the future of the web. In 2018 Google launched mobile-first indexing which means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a website instead of desktop for indexing and ranking when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query on Google Search. In other words, mobile-friendly responsive websites will rank higher. This is the reason why Google PageSpeed Insights test mobile versions for speed first.
You should hire web designers to design mobile-friendly responsive and speed-optimized websites from the outset.
Ways to Speed Up Your Website
As of February 2021, since 40% of the websites are powered by WordPress, we focus on ways to optimize WordPress websites. With that being said, the below tactics are also applicable to websites that are built with other content management systems.
Fast Lightweight Themes
Pick a fast lightweight WordPress theme that is built with only the features you want. Disable all the features that your website does not use. Then pick a template that fits your business and loads fast. To optimize your website page speed, you need to keep your theme up to date.
Fewer Well-Maintained Plugins
Most plugins use JavaScript which potentially slows down your site. This is particularly true for poorly coded plugins. So you should use only well coded, popular, and well-maintained plugins but still use them sparingly. Keeping your plugins up to date for better website performance.
Minification
Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files to reduce the file size. This removes all their unnecessary whitespace, comments, line-breaks, or characters from the source code.
Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources
Before a browser can display a web page, it needs to parse or render its HTML. If your browser encounters some JavaScript or CSS during this rendering process, it has to stop and execute them. You should eliminate render-blocking resources to optimize your website page speed.
Optimize Images
- Compress images to reduce the image file size.
- Use properly sized images on each page to save data and improve page load time.
- Lazy-load offscreen images after all critical resources have finished loading to lower Time to Interactive
- Serve images in next-gen formats like WebP. They provide better compression than PNG or JPG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.
Server Response Time
Reduce the server response time i.e. time to the first byte because all other requests depend on it. Themes, plugins, and server specifications all contribute to server response time. Use a fast lightweight theme and an optimization plugin. Upgrade your server to optimize your website page speed.
Caching
Browsers cache CSS, images, JavaScript, etc. So, when a user next time visits your site, the browser does not need to reload the entire page. Set your “expires” header for how long you want the information to be cached to optimize your website page speed.
Dynamic Caching is for non-static resources. It prevents unnecessary database queries and processing of each visit. It improves page load speed and the TTFB (time to first byte) of your pages.
Object caching improves connections between WordPress and its database. It improves the loading speed of all dynamic pages like checkout pages, dashboards, etc.
Reduce Redirects
Reduce redirects because redirecting a page (e.g. yourwebsite.com) to another page (e.g. m.yourwebsite.com) increases page load time.
Preconnect, DNS-Prefetch, Preload
Establishing connections may involve DNS lookups, redirects, and round trips to the final server that handles the user’s request. Most of the time is spent waiting rather than exchanging data.
Add <link rel=”preconnect“>, <link rel=”dns-prefetch”> or to <link rel=”preload“> inform the browser that your page intends to establish early connections to important third-party origins.
Gzip
Use Gzip to compress CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files to reduce the file size to optimize your website page speed.
CDN
A Content Delivery Networks (CDN) is a network of geographically diverse servers for delivering website content using mirror sites. Users from different parts of the world can access your site faster. Use a CDN if you have visitors worldwide.
HTTP/2
HTTP/2 deploys multiplexing for faster data transfer, compression of headers for transferring less data and prioritization for proper page rendering. This hence optimizes your website page speed.
HTTP/2 requires SSL/TLS for websites to take advantage of HTTP/2. Be sure to use a web host that supports HTTP/2.
Summary
As you can tell, there are many ways to optimize your website page speed. Having a fast website is important for better SEO and hence higher Google Search rankings. It improves your website’s user experience, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
We hope that this website page speed optimization guide can help you speed up your website. If you find it useful, please take a moment and share it with your friends.
We will write more articles on website performance in the coming future so stay tuned.
Learn how to get a high performance score on PageSpeed Insights for your website.
