Website page speed optimization is one of the most effective ways of boosting the total performance of your site, increasing your chances of getting a preferable ranking from search engines, and showing the users the desired experience. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you Improve website loading time:
Understand Page Speed and Its Importance
- Impact on SEO: Several ranking factors have been suggested by search engines such as Google, and one of them is page speed. Fast pages have a good ranking in the search engine.
- User Experience: Having a slow site affects the bounce rate and their engagement level, and this contributes to a poor conversion rate.
Measure Your Current Page Speed by using Page speed analysis tools
- Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool provides the insight about the mobile page speed optimization as well as provides website speed audit, it also suggests how the score may be enhanced.
- GTmetrix: Information related to the site includes these aspects of the site, status of the site, few parameters, time spent loading the page, size of the page, and number of requests.
- WebPageTest: This enables one to test the site from various locations and browsers, hence offering the developers a performance preview and an insight about how to increase website speed.
- Lighthouse: This is a web page performance and SEO tool that is built into Chrome DevTools and is entirely free of charge.
Optimize Images
- Image Compression: Try to compress the images that should not have an impact on the quality of the pictures with the help of TinyPNG, ImageOptim, JPEGmini, etc.
- Responsive Images: If you want to pre-determine which images should be loaded as responsive images, you should place the images into the attribute ‘srcset’.
- Lazy Loading: It loads images just before the images are about to be scrolled in the viewport.
Minimize HTTP Requests
- Combine Files: Minimize the HTTP request by joining CSS and JavaScript files.
- Reduce Third-Party Scripts: Minimize the usage of third-party scripts as well as plugins because it slows down the website
Leverage Browser Caching
- Set Expiry Dates: Set up IIS/Apache or any other web server so that any static resources have a certain time-out so that the client does not have to download everything over again.
- Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): Ensure you spread your content on several servers across different global regions to minimize delays.
Improve Server Response Time
- Choose a reliable hosting provider: Check that the provider provides satisfactory performance and scalability of the server.
- Use a Content Management System (CMS) Cache: Use caching on the server side where you have options like using Varnish Cache or Redis.
- Optimize Database Queries: It is also advised that your database should be well-indexed and properly optimized for a faster return on queries.
Optimize Web Fonts
- Limit Web Fonts: Limit the number of used font weights and styles, as fewer of them mean that the sizes of font files will be smaller.
- Use Modern Formats: Opt for modern font formats like WOFF2, which are more efficient than older formats.
- Font Loading Strategy: It is recommended to use the font-display attribute with the swap value so that text remains visible during loading.
