In the modern world, people expect to be able to find information instantly, whether they’re looking for something on the internet or on their smartphones. Website speed is more important than ever before. That’s why we’ve written this comprehensive guide to optimising your website for speed.
Website speed is not something you should ignore. People are coming to the internet to get information. Depending on how quick they need an answer, this will determine how much patience they will have for your page to load. In fact, it’s essential for your SEO success. A slow website can cause you to lose visitors, damage your reputation, and potentially damage your business.
Google has recently announced that speed will now be a factor in their search rankings. If you want your site to perform well in Google, you must make sure it loads fast.
So for both the robots and the humans, your site has to load fast. For humans, we know people now have a 3-second attention span. And the robots, are just spoiled for choice.
This is a vast change for SEO and can have a massive impact on your search rankings.
It’s vital that your website loads fast and that you keep your visitors engaged with your content.
The fact is that if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, then visitors will leave immediately. In fact, according to research by Google, if your site takes more than 4 seconds to load, you will lose 30% of your visitors.
This is why it is critical that you take steps to speed up your site. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get a faster site.
There are some common things you can do to speed up your website so it shows up higher in search results. This guide will walk you through the importance and process of finding and fixing your website’s speed issues.
What is web page speed optimisation?
Web page speed optimisation is the process of making your site load as quickly as possible. It is more than just making your site’s HTML code “faster”.
A faster website can mean having a better user experience, better search engine performance, and a better customer experience.
Most websites are not designed to be fast. They are built using bloated frameworks that are designed to be as inefficient as possible.
This means that they are slow and make your site take longer to load.
You can’t just add more RAM and CPU power to your server. This won’t improve your site speed. Instead, you need to work on the framework you’re using.
Once you know what the issues are, you can fix them and speed up your site.
How to measure site speed
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is the most popular site speed checker. It’s free, and it’s updated regularly.
You can use it to test the performance of your site on mobile and desktop devices.
It’s also helpful to know where your site stands against others. You can compare your score against those of other sites, and you can even get suggestions on what you can do to improve your performance.
To run the test, enter the URL of the page you want to test into the tool, and you’ll see a list of the most important factors that affect the speed of a page. You can easily select any of the items in the list and see exactly what’s slowing down the load time.
There are also plenty of tools that you can use to test and measure the speed of your site. These include GTMetrix, Pingdom, and WebPageTest.
While you’re testing, it’s a good idea to try to make small changes that you can add to your site.
Once you’ve made these changes, it’s a good idea to test again.
What are the most common mistakes that websites make that affect speed?
There are many factors that can affect how fast a website loads.
Some of these factors are outside your control, such as the number of images on your page, the complexity of your code, and the speed of your server.
However, you can still reduce the load time of your site, even if you don’t have full control over these areas.
The most common mistakes that websites make are:
- Poorly coded HTML
- Poorly optimised images
- Broken JavaScript
- Heavy plugins
- Slow hosting
- Incorrect redirects
What you need to do to speed up your website
A speedy website will increase the number of people who visit your site, keep them longer, and hopefully convert them into paying customers.
You can’t just sit back and wait for your site to load. You need to get to work and speed it up.
Here are a few tips you can follow to speed up your site:
Use lightweight frameworks
Modern web browsers are capable of handling a wide range of websites. However, the problem is that most developers opt for bloated and complicated frameworks.
While it’s perfectly fine to use a framework for development purposes, it’s not always the best choice for SEO.
Most SEO frameworks are heavy on the JavaScript. While this is necessary for many features, it can hurt your website’s speed.
A better option is to use a lightweight framework such as React or Vue.js. These are faster, easier to use, and much more SEO friendly.
Use CDNs to load static files
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a great way of speeding up your website. They provide your site with the ability to deliver large files such as images, videos, and other assets to your visitors quickly.
CDNs have been around for a long time, and they’ve developed into reliable service that delivers webpages and other content quickly.
If you have a large website or a blog, using a CDN is an excellent way to improve your website’s performance.
For example, if you’re hosting a video on your site, you can host it on YouTube and let Google handle the delivery. This way, YouTube can load your video for your visitors almost instantly, instead of waiting for you to download the file and upload it to your server.
You can use CDNs for your images, CSS, JavaScript, and other files. This means that your site will load faster for your users, and it will also benefit you from an SEO perspective.
Minify JavaScript and CSS
JavaScript and CSS files are the most common cause of slow-loading websites. They are large, and they are often embedded within other files.
Minifying your code reduces the size of your website files, thereby increasing its speed. It also removes unnecessary code that could interfere with your website’s performance.
Minifying your code can dramatically improve the speed of your website. The smaller the file, the faster your website will load.
There are two ways to minify your code: through a third-party tool or by hand.
A third-party tool can remove unnecessary whitespace, line breaks, comments, and more. It is recommended that you use a free tool such as WebPagetest to check the minification of your code.
The second method is more hands-on.
Optimise images
Images are the most important element of any website. They help users navigate your site, identify what you’re selling, and give your website a visual appeal that is unparalleled by text alone.
Images can slow down your website because they are usually large. This means that it takes time to download and load them into your web browser.
However, you don’t have to use large images. In fact, you can compress them so that they’re smaller.
Image compression has become much easier in recent years, so it’s now possible to compress images without sacrificing quality.
For example, you can use an image compressor like TinyPNG to compress images.
You can also compress images using Photoshop, although this is more of a manual process.
Images are the most important element of any website. They help users navigate your site, identify what you’re selling, and give your website a visual appeal that is unparalleled by text alone.
The importance of Fast loading website
Google has recently announced that speed will now be a factor in their search rankings. If you want your site to perform well in Google, you must make sure it loads fast.
A fast-loading website is not only crucial for SEO success, it also improves the user experience.
A slow-loading website causes users to lose interest and will ultimately lead to a decrease in conversions and sales.
The reason why is that when a visitor comes to your site, they want to find what they are looking for quickly.
They won’t want to sit around waiting for your site to load. When they go to your competitor’s site, they will find that their site loads instantly.
The bottom line is that a slow-loading website is a bad customer experience, and it’s the last thing you want.
How much should you budget for a website speed optimisation plan?
I’m often asked what’s the best way to go about getting a website speed optimisation plan done.
The truth is that there is no “best” way to go about this. There are a number of factors that influence the cost of a plan, including your budget and the complexity of the optimisation.
While most businesses don’t have a budget for this, it is important to remember that you need to spend money to save money.
As the saying goes, “you get what you pay for”, and you’ll notice that there are different levels of website speed optimisation.
You can start with a basic level of optimisation, or you can invest in a more complex plan that will cost a lot more money.
If you are on a tight budget, I would suggest starting off with the basic plan and then upgrading your plan later on.
If you are not in a position to upgrade to a more expensive plan, you can always consider a more affordable plan, such as a CDN (content delivery network).
A CDN is a type of server that is located closer to your visitors. This means that it can serve your content faster than a traditional server.
You can also look at using a caching plugin such as WP Rocket, which will speed up your website.
Conclusion
Optimising your website speed is a topic that gets a lot of attention these days. The internet has changed the way we shop, read, and work online.
There’s no doubt that your site needs to be mobile-friendly. But it’s also important to be as speedy as possible. And that means being aware of how you can improve the speed of your site.
If you do it right, you can increase your conversions by more than 10%, which will give you a huge advantage over your competitors.
The great thing is that it’s easy to do. The only thing you need is a little know-how and a couple of tools.
