If there's one place where first impressions count, it's on your website—and we're not just talking about design and content. Furthermore, one of the most critical determinants of its success is speed optimization.
A slow-loading website can damage your reputation and cost you money by causing you to lose traffic and conversions. On the other hand, a high-performing website will have a domino effect on your company's success. It will bring in more visitors, which will increase sales, leads, and customers.
The first step to improve page speed is to build it with a solid website builder that includes optimized technology from the start. However, your job doesn’t end there; it is up to you to ensure the content on your site does not impede its performance.
There are numerous variables to consider, but you've arrived at the right place. We'll go over everything you need to know about website speed optimization and how to improve page loading speed.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed refers to how quickly content on your website loads. There are numerous ways to measure page speed (for example, first contentful paint, speed index, and large contentful paint), but one of the most meaningful ways to define page speed is by time to interactive.
The time it takes for a page to load to the point where a user can interact with it is referred to as the time to interact. This could mean clicking on a CTA, watching a video, or any of the other actions a user can take on a given page.
"What constitutes good website speed?" is likely to be your next question. While the answer varies by industry, it is strongly advised that your pages load in less than three seconds on average. It's also worth noting that page speed times can vary between pages on the same site, as well as between mobile and desktop.
Why is Page Speed Important?
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When it comes to website speed optimization, there are four main reasons why page speed matters:
∙ Usability
Although it may appear obvious, the faster your pages load, the sooner a website becomes interactive. We're talking about things like the website menu, visual content, buttons, and other things that encourage visitors to interact with your site. Happy, returning visitors will result from allowing these features to become visible and usable more quickly through page speed optimization. That's all there is to it.
∙ Users
When users can move through processes more quickly, they are more likely to engage with your website. For example, if you run an online store and each step of the checkout process takes more than a few seconds to load, it's understandable that potential customers will abandon the process entirely.
Any action a user takes, such as filling out forms or navigating between pages, is the same. Conversion rates and the number of visitors who return to your site will suffer as a result of website speed issues that limit user engagement.
∙ Conversions
Conversions are a common goal shared by the majority of website owners. According to studies, even a 0.1-second improvement in your website speed can improve your conversion rate, funnel progression, and customer engagement. Visitors will move on to the next site if they can't use your features quickly enough.
∙ Search Engines
When ranking websites, Google considers website speed (known as SEO, Search Engine Optimization). As a result, if you want yours to appear higher in specific keyword search results, every millisecond faster your pages are visible to the eye increases your chances.
How to Shorten the Time It Takes for a Page to Load
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Want to learn how to improve website performance but don't know where to begin? There's no need to be concerned; we've taken care of everything. To improve website performance, user experience, and SEO rankings, use these 10 website speed optimization levers.
1. Set Up a Quick Infrastructure or Use a Quick Host
Having the proper infrastructure is the first step in optimizing page speed. Make certain that your web stack is optimized for speed. A dedicated, high-performance server should be used to host your website. Even if your website has a clean design and optimized code, shared servers can cause it to load slowly. Check that you're using the most recent technology. Also, make certain that caching is optimized.
2. Make Use of a CDN
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Do you want to know how to shorten the time it takes for a web page to load? Reduce the amount of time information must travel between your server and the end-user. Doesn't that make sense? Using a CDN is a quick and easy way to accomplish this. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that are geographically distributed (also known as POPs). They work together to increase page speed for the delivery of your web content. A CDN is an excellent way to increase page speed whether your site uses HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, or videos.
3. Use Gzip to Compress Files
GZip is a type of server-side data compression that reduces the time it takes for a page to load. In other words, it compresses a set of data for more streamlined, efficient delivery to a user's computer.HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files are compressed using Gzip compression. It is important to note that it does not work on images or videos because they are already compressed separately. The good news is that major CDNs enable GZip compression by default, so if you use a CDN, your website is most likely already protected.
4. Limit the Number of HTTP Requests
The reduction of the number of HTTP requests made by a page is a highly effective method for reducing page load time. When someone visits a web page, the browser sends a ping to the web server, requesting the files that make up the page's content. The browser renders the page's content when the server returns the requested files. Each file that makes up the page's content is sent as a separate HTTP request by the browser. The more files on the page, the more HTTP requests, and thus the longer it takes for your web page to load.
5. Reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript
Minifying JavaScript and CSS files is another effective way to improve page speed. Minification is a process that removes all unnecessary characters, comments, and spaces from code and replaces them with shorter variable and function names, resulting in a more streamlined code. The fewer bytes of data in your code, the easier and faster the page loading speed will be.
6. Simplify Your HTML
Simplify your HTML code to increase page speed Bloated HTML increases the amount of data transmitted to users. It can also have an effect on JavaScript performance when manipulating the DOM. If your HTML pages contain 5,000 or 6,000 lines of code before any content (yes, this does happen, even among Fortune 500 companies), you're dealing with bloated HTML.
7. Optimize Images to Improve Page Speed
What is one of the most common reasons for slow websites?
Images! Images that are extremely large. We've seen some websites with images larger than 1MB and others with images larger than 5MB. Yikes! Don't do it. Large image files significantly slow down the speed of your landing page while also making the site visitor wait (often in frustration).
Optimize your images without sacrificing image quality. You want small image files, but you also don't want a sloppy-looking website. You can use a plethora of image optimization plugins like TinyPNG for image optimization.
8. Organize Your Media Collection
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It's very likely that your media library has become cluttered with old or unused images over time. This simply clogs your website. For faster average page speed, clean up your media library by deleting unnecessary images and other media files.
9. Organize Your Database
Your database, like your media library, can become bloated over time with unused information such as photos, files, and so on. The process of identifying and removing garbage data and unused content from your database is known as database optimization. As a result, your web hosting server will be able to retrieve requested information more quickly.
10. Remove JavaScript that is Rendering-blocking
When your web pages load in a browser, a call is made to every script, which is frequently located at other URLs. Before the page is visible to the user, that queue of scripts must be completed and empty. Render-blocking JavaScript files become a major stumbling block in these queues because they can take a long time to load, delaying the rendering of the main content on the page. Web browsers load resources in the order they appear in the HTML by default. When the resources necessitate a large amount of computing power on the user's device, they can cause a significant delay in the visual rendering of the page. However, many of these scripts are not required to view the web page for the first time. In many cases, these scripts would be fine to run after the page has loaded.
Set your render-blocking JavaScript to load asynchronously or remove unused or unimportant scripts to resolve this issue (or unused portions of your JavaScript resources).
Create a Website with Strikingly
Strikingly is a platform that is constantly working to improve website statistics. Our technical staff has optimized the speed of our website over the years. The majority of our platform's websites have a PageSpeed Insights score of greater than 90. A high Google Page Speed score improves your SEO while also ensuring that your visitors have a positive experience on both desktop and mobile versions.
Conclusion
Improving your site's page speed is critical for higher search rankings. PageSpeed Insights provides a list of best practices and potential improvements, ranked by their impact on the speed of your site.
While the score should not be too important, it is a good idea to try to get it to at least 50. However, pay attention to load time, which is measured in seconds. A good website should take about 3 seconds to load. A super-fast one should load in about 1.
When it comes to website speed, having a good server, compressing images, and keeping things clean and simple in your code will benefit you the most. While smaller sites will benefit the most from a shared server, if you are a larger company, hosting your site on custom tower servers is a better option. A private server, which allows businesses to edit and maintain their website, would provide flexibility and dependability when they needed it the most.
