Page speed is essential for an optimized website. It measures how fast your website loads in browsers. It is so essential because it directly affects user experience in your website. For example, if you have a website that takes too long to load, users will not wait. They will most likely exit your page and move on to other pages.
Many factors affect your website’s speed including your hosting, the size of the images, if you have videos or if you have plug-ins.
Page speed is one of the confirmed factors that affect ranking. The faster your website loads, it is more likely that it will rank higher on searches. However, this is something you need to assess carefully because speed depends on many factors and it will vary from mobile version to desktop version.
Here are some things you can do to improve your website’s speed:
- Minimize JavaScript, CSS and HTML:
This is more on the side of coding. Sometimes when building the website code, many elements like line breaks, spacing or characters are not necessary to improve the user’s experience. Many of these elements are placed because they help humans understand the code better. However, by minimizing it, the computer will understand it faster. Start by doing an audit to the code and remove all unnecessary elements. - Enable browser caching:
Browser caching is a tool that enables users to load a page faster if they have visited it in the past. This is highly beneficial because when the user visits your website, their browser stores many elements. When this user returns, it won’t send as many requests to the server because they already have a lot of the elements stored. - Reduce HTTP Requests:
When a user visits your website, an HTTP request is sent to the server to start downloading all images, text and video on your page. This usually happens in less than seconds but when it is not optimized correctly, it will take longer to load the page. The user will not be able to see the site until the request is completed. By reducing the amount of clicks a user needs to make to read or view a content, you are reducing the amount of requests. The less requests, the less time it will take to show the full page. - Compress images:
Compressing images is one of the fastest solutions to improve your website’s speed. It is very common that original images uploaded to a website are very big files. It must become a frequent practice that whenever you are uploading images to your website, you compress them to be of a smaller size but to still keep their high quality.
Last but not least, if you need expert help diagnosing and taking action to improve your website speed, we are here to assist. Contact us here for more information.
