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Page Speed Optimization and Improvement Ways
Page Speed Optimization and Improvement Ways

Page speed plays a critical role in building a search engine (SEO) and conversion rate optimized website. With digital marketing, poor website performance has a considerable negative impact on:

 

  • Your potential to generate revenue.
  • How long visitors spend on your website.
  • The percentage of your traffic that gets converted into paying customers.
  • Your cost per click (CPC) expenses in paid search.
  • Your website's organic search ranking.

 

Yet, because of the sheer amount of aspects digital marketers have to attend to and the lack of time to do so, page speed improvement often gets pushed to the back of the queue. We can attribute this negligence to most people misunderstanding this factor's importance, typically overlooking the value of investing time and money on improving their website's performance by a few seconds.

 

Even though this may appear to be a negligible amount of time to many marketers, data from industry giants verifies that this improvement is monumental.

 

Determining why your website is running slower than it should be, isn’t an easy task, though. The problem may arise from many aspects, including everything from poorly written code to large page elements or images. Yet, promptly diagnosing and fixing these problems is essential, as Google will penalize you if you don't.

 

Most search engines give preferential treatment to faster loading websites. Sites that load quickly have a lower user bounce rate, improving your chances of being ranked on Google's SERP results.

 

Page Speed Explained

We typically define page speed as either:

 

  • Page load time - How long it takes the website to display the content of a specific page entirely, or
  • Time to first byte - The time it takes for the browser to gain the first byte of data from the server

 

It's advisable to regularly check your website's pace using the Google page speed evaluation tool, PageSpeed Insights. This tool uses integrated data from the Chrome user experience report (CrUX) and statistics from influential speed metrics, such as:

 

  • DOMContentLoaded (DCL)
  • First Contentful Paint (FCP)

 

Google's page speed test will provide you with a detailed analysis of the factors that are slowing down your website and advice on how to fix these problems to reach a score of 100 percent with the PageSpeed Insights tool.

 

Why Is Page Speed Important?

A study recently conducted by Amazon revealed a page speed variation of as little as 100ms was enough to reduce their sales by one percent effectively. If a unit of time that's not even conceivable by the human mind can have such a drastic effect on sales, you can only imagine the impact that a second or more will have.

 

Apart from your website's load speed affecting your sales, it also severely influences your pay-per-click expenses and organic search ranking.

 

Page speed should be one of your primary concerns when you invest in a web host. Ensure that the company you choose to create your website will emphasize providing you with the performance you need to satisfy Google and your visitors.

 

Best Ways to Improve Your Page Speed

Google recently revealed that its algorithm uses site speed as one signal to rank pages. Further research shows that the search engine giant may potentially measure "time to first byte" specifically with page speed. For these reasons, it's essential to be knowledgeable about the best ways to improve page speed. These methods include:

 

Minimize HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

To optimize your code and substantially increase your page speed, it's advisable to remove the following:

 

  • All unnecessary characters such as spaces and commas
  • Code comments
  • Formatting
  • Unused code

 

Use Compression to Your Advantage

There is various useful file compression software available that enables you to reduce the size of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that exceed 150 bytes in size. Be careful when you compress image files, though. Using some zip programs will result in you losing control over the pictures' quality.

 

Minify Redirects

Every time a website redirects to another page, the visitor spends additional and unnecessary extra time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to finish. For instance, a redirect-pattern that resembles "xxxx.com -> www.xxxx.com -> m.xxxx.com -> m.xxxx.com/home," has two unnecessary deviations that will cause your page to load slower.

 

Utilize Browser Caching

Browsers can cache a lot of data, including images, JavaScript, stylesheets, etc., preventing it from having to reload the complete page when a user revisits your site. It's essential to set your "expires" header to a reasonable period (12 months is usually good) for the amount of time you require the information to be cached.

 

Make Use of a Content Distribution Network

Content distribution networks (CDNs) are server systems designed to divide the burden of delivering information. Multiple copies of your website are stored at various geographically distinct data centers, allowing users more reliable and faster access to your site.

 

Avoid the Use of Render-Blocking JavaScript

Before a website can render a page, it has to create a DOM tree by decoding HTML. If any form of script is present, this process gets interrupted as it first has to stop and then run the Javascript.

 

it's wise to minimize or avoid the use of render-blocking JavaScript altogether to improve your website's speed.

 

Optimize Your Server Response Time

Server response time is typically affected by:

 

  • The amount of traffic your website receives
  • The resources used by each page
  • The software used by the server
  • Your hosting solution

 

Your server response time can be improved by identifying performance bottlenecks such as slow routing, lack of adequate memory, or slow database queries and fixing them to reach an optimal flow under 200ms.

 

Enhance Your Images

Be sure that your images are in the correct file format (PNGs for graphics and JPEGs for photographs) and that their size doesn't exceed the allocated maximum. Also, ensure that all your data is compressed for the internet.

 

Additionally, all frequently used images, like icons and buttons, should be built using CSS sprites. They combine these into one massive picture that loads everything at once, resulting in fewer HTTP requests.

 

It also enables you to display only the sections you wish, subsequently saving you load time and avoids subjecting users to wait for multiple images to load.

 

To Wrap Up

When you build your website, it's essential to find the unique balance between perfection and load time. To score as close to 100 percent on Google's PageSpeed Insights as possible, you need to prioritize identifying the underlying issues affecting your website's pace and fix the problem areas.

 

Although there are many ways to improve your page speed, starting with optimizing and compressing images and HTML, Javascript, and CSS, then moving on to leveraging browser caching will prove tremendous help in achieving your goal. Keep in mind, though; there are various excellent tools available on the net for this purpose.

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