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If you have a website that represents your business then website page loading speed matters a lot.
But why?
Why is website page loading speed important? And if it matters a lot then how to improve website page loading speed?
Don’t worry, we got you covered. Through this blog, you will learn why website page loading speed is crucial and 10 quick ways to improve website page loading speed.
So, we will not waste our time in introduction, let’s get started.
The amount of time your website takes to deliver the content on the page from the server is called website page loading speed. Many factors influence the page speed including quantity and type of content on the page, server hosting, server response time, device, operating system, and browser.
All these impact the website page loading speed. There are a lot of tools that you can use to measure your website page loading speed easily. Remember, page loading speed metrics also dramatically impact your SEO ranking.
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If you and your company launch a website, you do so to influence customers to do something; consume content, make a purchase, use your application, etc. Page speed affects your search engine ranking as slow sites negatively affect the user experience.
In fact, according to Google, if your page takes more than three seconds to load, your chances of a bounce nearly triple.
But it’s also important to clarify that page speed is not the only metric. See, page speed is highly important in terms of user engagement. Pages loading speed influences user perception, if page speed is slow then you’ve lost them before page loading finishes. Here, this is how your page loading speed can affect your website traffic.
If your website page takes 3 sec to completely load, you’ve lost 45% of your visitors. A decrease in website page loading speed of 500 milliseconds can dramatically affect user perception of your site, product, or even business. Moreover, to maintain your brand reputation and visitors, your page speed could underline your goals and business revenue.
The ultimate point is that the more pages you will add the heavier and slow it will become. And ultimately, it will hurt your ability to drive engagement and conversions.
If you want to run a highly effective website, therefore, you need to optimize your whole website for the best performance including content visualization, loading time, images, videos, etc.
Before making any changes to your website, you need to identify what exactly is the problem. To measure your site performance, there are a number of tools available online which you can use such as Google PageSpeed Insight or GTmatrix.
Improving your page loading speed and performance requires complete in-depth information about the issue. And tools like GTmatrix and Google PageSpeed Insight enable you to analyze your website and make changes accordingly. Each tool gives different types of results; therefore, you should know what part of your website is causing problems.
Both tools are user-friendly and easy to understand, and give you better options to perform quality checks on your website.
We would recommend you start with Google PageSpeed Insight. The tool allows you to improve the performance of your website. PSI is the most proficient tool that analyzes your website code and provides you recommendations on what are the changes that need to be done to improve page loading speed. This Google tool uses a variety of factors that helps you measure the page performance, including;
These elements allow you to comprehend some crucial aspects for making considerable changes to your website to improve its performance. Now let’s understand each element:
First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a metric that gives you information about the time it takes for the first piece of content to be displayed on your screen. And this could be text, images, graphics, videos, or anything else, it all falls into the FCP metric. First Contentful Paint is an important metric for measuring and performing perceived actions to make website performance and speed on a good level.
Time to Interact (TTI) provides the time it takes for a web page to become fully interactive. A web page is considered fully interactive (all the functionalities of a page are usable) when the web page is completely accessible, which is measured by the First Contentful Paint. The web page should respond to user interactions within 50 ms or even less.
Total Blocking Time (TBT), is a performance-oriented metric that helps you measure the total amount of time that a web page is blocked from responding to user input (User Request). TBT is measured by including the blocking section of all functions between FCP and TTI. Any task that is performed for more than 50 ms is considered as a long task. The time taken after 50 ms is considered as a blocking task.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a core web vital that measures the loading experience of a user's first impression of a web page. LCP is important because it helps you measure how quickly the main content of a web page becomes visible to users. LCP measures web page performance and speed by giving scores. To provide a good user experience, LCP gives you good and bad scores as per your website's overall performance. A good score is 2.5 seconds or even less. These scores indicate how your user can behave when they come to your website for the first time.
Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) is a measure of how much a web page moves/shifts when it is loading. This mainly happens when ads, images, or other elements of a page are taking too much time to load or in the wrong pattern and place. So, CLS is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, many experts say that your website CLS score should be 0.1 or even less if possible.
Things You Can Do to Improve Your FCP/TTI/TBT/LCP/CLS, Such As:
By utilizing these tools you can gather some essential information about your website performance and speed. You can take considerable action to improve your web page loading speed. However, the main question is how you can improve website page loading speed. Let’s discuss this further.
Now that you understand the importance of web page loading speed and what factors affect them, it’s time to learn how to improve web page loading speed.
With these 10 quick ways, you can improve your website page loading speed and generate higher user engagement. With that in mind, let’s take a look at 10 ways to improve website page loading speed.
1. Choose a Performance-optimized Hosting Platform
The hosting provider or service you choose plays a crucial role in website management and performance. This includes web page loading.
Typically, good reliable and performance-optimized hosting providers use faster servers and powerful hardware compared to shared hosting providers. As a result, your website will have more resources that lead to faster loading time.
When choosing a host server, one of the worst mistakes is settling for hosting services that are cheaper in every part. Remember, hosting is one of the most prioritized sections that give your website a huge boost in terms of speed.
Cheap hosting services are not tailored to performance-optimized; as a result, your website performance will automatically decrease.
Do you know this kind of cheap hosting provider usually provides shared hosting services? Sharing resources between multiple websites on an overloaded server or already shared server, then it hurts your website and leads to slow page loading and low performance.
To improve website page loading speed, you can choose Bluehost, WP Engine, or DreamHost. They all offer premium quality, a wide range of features, and plans at affordable prices. These hosting providers single platform and share hosting service, but it all depends on your requirements.
2. Compress and Optimize Images for Better Performance
Images affect your website's visibility and performance. Also, images are one of the key factors in terms of Google ranking. Today, Google has become more advanced than it was ever before. Its capability and optimization for better user experience is the reason why Google has no competitor.
Google is constantly evolving to provide unmatchable experience and filter search for content that is 100% relevant. As a ranking factor, adding images should be relevant to your page objective.
Images enhance your web page's visuality and increase the quality of your content. However, being more graphics-oriented and large can become a major factor in reducing your website page loading speed.
Therefore, one of the easiest ways to increase your website page loading speed is by optimizing and compressing your images. This can include changing image file format, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images through compression tools.
The Internet is filled with image optimization tools which can be used to reduce your image file size without losing the actual quality of the images. The tools that you can use are Optimizilla, iLoveIMG, ImageOptim, and TinyPNG. These are one of the best and free-to-use image compressor and optimizer tools and can reduce the image file size by 70% to 80%.
With the lazy loading technique, images will not be loaded or visible until users scroll down to the point where they become visible. Similarly, there are a lot of options that can be integrated to reduce the file size of an image. This technique helps you improve the performance of your website.
3. Reduce Your Redirects
Many experts use redirects to improve the user experience, maintain SEO ranking and prevent duplicate content. But overdoing it can hurt your website page loading speed. Every time a page redirects to other pages, it prolongs the HTTP request and response process.
As I mentioned, redirects are important when you are moving to a new domain. Removing unnecessary redirect links can increase website page loading speed.
There are many ways to reduce redirects in WordPress. When creating an internal link and menu on the page, avoid creating unnecessary ones. The second is making sure that your top-level domain (TLD) resolves with at most one redirection.
If you need help identifying redirects that are incorrectly set up on your site, you can use the Redirect Mapper tool. This helps you identify any duplicate redirect links on your website. Tools are many, and using them depends on your requirements.
4. Cache Your Web Pages
Caching is one of the most effective ways to improve website page loading speed. You can use a caching technique that stores copies of frequently accessed web pages in a temporary location such as on a hard drive or server memory.
When users search for a specific page which was previously opened (already cached), the server can simply retrieve the cached copy and deliver it to the users.
There are two main types of caching:
This is a great technique that helps you improve your site performance and increase web page loading speed. You can use various cache plugins to make your website performance healthy; however, using too many plugins can hurt your website performance. How? The next point is about this.
5. Remove Unnecessary Plugins
There are many plugins that offer you different kinds of functionalities for your website. But not all plugins are created in an equal manner. Using too many plugins on your website can diversely hurt your web page loading speed.
Apart from that, plugins that are outdated or aren’t maintained well generally pose a security threat. Your website can be filled with compatibility issues that result in low performance or even slow loading speed.
So, is there a solution to it? Yes, there are so many solutions available to remove unnecessary plugins from your website. The best way to do that is disabling or removing the outdated and not workable plugins from your WordPress site.
Take a comprehensive look at which plugins you aren’t using recently, disable them and as a result, your website page loading speed issue will be solved.
6. Leverage Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that is also known as a ‘content distribution network’ that helps you to improve website page loading speed. It does this by hosting and distributing copies of your site's static content from servers located around the world.
A CDN works with different technologies, instead of your host. In addition to the server hosting your primary website, you can take advantage of a CDN to distribute copies of your site's files among strategically chosen data centers.
This can maximize performance, minimizing the distance data requests have to travel between browsers and your host's servers. By loading content for a web page from a server near each visitor, CDNs help reduce network latency and create a lower TTFB.
You have a variety of CDN options to choose from, one of which is to opt for a host that offers a CDN that you can enable directly from your dashboard.
7. Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
JavaScript, CSS, and HTML are heavy elements which can impact your site's performance and speed. Minifying JavaScript, CSS, and HTML can improve your website page loading speed.
How can I do that?
You can start removing line breaks, white space, comments or other unnecessary elements in the code that don’t impact user experience. This can significantly reduce the size of the codes and as a result, it flaws you much faster web page loading speed.
8. Reduce HTTP Requests
Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the underlying protocol used for the communication between clients and servers on the World Wide Web. But you probably already knew it.
So, HTTP requests happen when a web browser sends a “Request” to a server for more information. A user sends requests to view more information on the page. (This file could contain images, text, multimedia, etc.) Users can’t see what information the page contains until the request is not completed.
But if the file doesn’t contain all the information then the browser will send another request.
The more browsers will send requests the more it will make the page slow. As a result, users will have to wait longer to view your entire page.
To know the HTTP requests, use Google Chrome.
Simply right-click on the page and select the option called “Inspect”. Go to the “Network” tab, hit the Ctrl+R or reload to collect the data from the page.
You will see all HTTP requests, their size and the time it took to load them. These include requests for images, plugins, JavaScript or CSS files (more on those later), and more.
You can also see the total number of requests in the lower-left corner of the Inspection window. You can use tools like GTmetrix to access the much broader information about the page HTTP requests.
9. Clean Up Your Database
Similar to optimizing images, the database should be cleaned up once in a while. An unused database highly impacts your website page loading speed. Therefore, database optimization is a process of identifying and removing garbage and unused files from your database.
This is also one of the effective and quick ways to improve website page loading speed. On top of that, this helps your web hosting server to fetch requested information more effectively.
10. Keep Up-To-Date Your Website
Last but not least, how to improve website page loading speed? The answer is to keep up to date your website with the best hosting servers, timely clean up your website, and keep updating your website.
Many forget this technique. Update your website with new modern functionalities and content. Therefore, use the latest tools to keep track of your website performance on a daily basis. As it is one of the important steps to consider for improving your SEO ranking.
To build your empire in today’s market, you need to be clever and faster than others. And your business website is exceptional. Running a business is another thing but running a website to run your business is a hefty task. There are so many things and elements that you need to cover for increasing and maintaining your business's online visibility.
A website that is slow, and not optimized with tools and SEO perspectives will fall down in no time. A fast and completely optimized website always wins in the long race and improves your online business visibility, customer retention and revenue. But to allow your website to rank higher and grab a wide range of customers' attention, it needs to be fast.
Want to make your website load fast? Here use these top 10 quick ways to improve website page loading speed. By using these quick solutions to improve website page loading speed.
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DC Kumawat is the CEO of Orion InfoSolutions, a leading provider of IT solutions to businesses of all sizes. He has over 14+ years of experience in the IT industry. He is a passionate advocate for the use of technology to improve business performance.