Ten Underrated Tricks That Boost Your Website Speed
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What is Website Speed?
Website speed is a function of how fast the content on your website loads. It also includes rendering, pre-rendering, and guiding people through various funnels and paths on your website.
People often confuse website speed with page speed. However, they are different from each other.
Page speed is about decreasing the load time of a specific page on your website. Optimizing page speed requires you to focus on improving page attributes.
However, site speed optimization requires you to improve various elements, from loading to link clicks to lead conversion. Why is it important?
We focus on direct response and customer acquisition in e-commerce, lead gen, and mobile. When it comes to results and leads, we speak your language.
Engineers at Google have discovered that the page load time of mere 0.4 seconds is long enough to cause users to search less.
Website speed also plays a critical role in improving organic search rankings on both desktop and mobile. It’s a significant part of technical SEO. You can start your speed optimization journey by using a free SEO audit tool to measure your site’s speed and other technical SEO aspects that affect performance.
In other words, it is critical to thoroughly analyze your site speed before taking steps to boost the same. But how exactly can you improve your website speed?
Ten Ways To Boost Your Website Speed
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Optimize Images
Images make up 21% of a total webpage’s weight. Large image files take more time to load and hence decrease page speed. Refrain from using images that are larger than required.
You must use the correct format of images too. PNGs are preferred for graphics, and JPEGs are best for photographs. You can find a png images here.
You can also leverage CSS Sprites to templatize website buttons and icons. Sprites convert N number of images into one large image, which is easier to load.
Check out this guide on how to optimize images to boost website speed.
2. Enable Compression
Reducing JavaScript, CSS, and other website components’ file sizes helps increase page speed. Using GZIP is one of the best ways to compress files.
Gzip is a software application that locates strings of similar code in your text files and temporarily replaces them to make the files smaller. It helps reduce up to 70% of page weight in some cases.
3. Implement Browser Caching
Browsers store temporary information and static files in the browser cache. This activity helps the user access content without requesting the same repeatedly.
Developers can change the cache settings and allow the browser to save elements that would not change often. You can add instructions in the HTTP header responses from the hosting server.
Browser Caching helps the browser transfer lesser data to the server, increasing page speed.
Read this guide to implement browser caching to speed up your website performance.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs like Amazon CloudFront and Google App Engine are a group of geographically distributed servers that work together to provide faster internet. They are used to reduce the page load by distributing the content on various servers.
Several copies of your websites are stored at different data centers. The load on your hosting server reduces immensely, and international visitors experience faster loading.
5. Reduce Redirects
Redirects are when the user enters a particular request and gets forwarded to a different page on the web. They are the best way to eliminate issues with broken links.
Reducing them is a thumb rule to increase page speed because they increase the number of HTTP requests. However, redirects lead to a longer loading time. Google suggests that site owners should ideally avoid redirects.
Use the SEO Spider tool to identify the number of redirects on your current website.
6. Choose The Right Host For Your Website
Getting a trustworthy host is essential for a growing website. Choosing the most affordable hosting option might make sense in the beginning. However, upgrading the host is imperative once your website attracts more traffic.
Generally, there are three hosting options: shared hosting, VPS hosting, and a dedicated server. Check out this guide to choose the right hosting option.
7. Minify HTTP and JavaScript files
Every piece of code adds to the size of your site. Code optimization methods like removing spaces, commas, and more can help increase your page speed.
Using WordPress plugins like WP Rocket make it very easy to minify HTTP and JavaScript files.
Also, using asynchronous loading for JavaScript plays a role. Synchronous loading happens one page at a time. On the other hand, asynchronous loading may simultaneously load several pages.
8. Improve Server Response Time
The server response time is a function of the number of users visiting your website. Your server’s software and hosting solution also play a role.
To improve server response time, you must check performance red flags like terrible memory, slow database query, slow routing, etc. The optimal server response time is under 200ms.
Read how to reduce server response time effectively.
9. Minimize HTTP Requests
80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different parts of the page, like images, stylesheets, and scripts.
Each of these elements makes individual HTTP requests. The more requests, the longer the page takes to load successfully.
Analyze your site’s HTTP requests and make changes to increase your website’s speed.
10. Prioritize the above Fold Content
You can also optimize site speed by prioritizing content above-the-fold (top sections). When above-the-fold content loads faster, the user does not have to wait for the entire page to load. This practice is also known as lazy loading.
Plugins like Speed Up and Smush help enable lazy loading on your website. You may leverage them to increase website speed.
Wrapping Up
Several other ways include identifying functionality overlaps, eliminating plugins, and reducing external scripts. The abovementioned are the most underrated yet effective tactics to boost your website speed significantly.
Even though boosting site speed is critical, many marketers still fail to work on this area of website optimization.
Hence, boosting website speed is not only important for better user experience and increased conversions, but it shall also gives you an edge over your competitors. Begin analyzing your website speed now!