Beginners Guide Speeding Up a Webpage
INTRODUCTION
Here’s a beginners guide speeding up a webpage? Have you tested the speed of your website recently? Page speed is an approach to determining how quickly material on a page loads.
If you want to increase traffic, orders, in-store visits, or phone calls from your website, you must have a quick page load speed. Accepting a sluggish website and your site will fall to the bottom of search results, allowing your competitors to acquire your customers.
How to quickly check the speed of your website
You can quickly determine the load time of your website by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
This free tool will give you an overall score for the speed of the mobile and desktop page.
However, it is critical to optimize your mobile page speed. With more than 50% of Internet traffic now coming from mobile devices, Google’s mobile-first index focuses on the mobile experience, so you’ll want a fast mobile site.
In addition to your score, you’ll have several different data points, including:
- First Contentful Paint
- First Meaningful Paint
- Time to Interactive
- First Input Delay
If you are not a developer, concentrate on First Meaningful Paint.
First Meaningful Paint indicates how long it takes for your site to load resources to enable users to interact with it. Although your page will not load completely in one second, it should load enough for users to interact with it.
A fast score enables users to engage with your content more quickly, which reduces their likelihood of leaving.
Why is a fast webpage critical?
Your page speed matters for two critical reasons:
Search engines
If you’re familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), you’ve probably heard some discussion about the importance of page speed to SEO — and it does. Search engines (and users) prefer websites that load quickly. That is why search engines such as Google, Bing. Duck Duck Go, and Yahoo considers page speed when rating websites.
By utilizing page speed as a ranking factor, search engines can enhance the user experience. They provide users with the knowledge and answers they need and the experience they expect.
If search engines regularly returned wrong results and extremely sluggish websites. They’d switch to a different search engine. That is why search engines now include page speed when determining a page’s ranking.
Almost 95% of online interactions begin with a search engine. If your business wishes to generate new leads online, you cannot afford to overlook search engines and search engine optimization.
Additionally, you cannot accept be on page two of the search engine. If you want to expand your business online, you need a page one ranking on search engines, as the majority of users stay on the first pages. According to studies, 75% of users stick to the first tab, and 75% of clicks go to the first three results on page one.
Users
When you enter a search query into Google, the last thing you want to do is wait for a response.
You anticipate that your search results will load quickly. When they don’t, you become discouraged and look for answers elsewhere, most likely on another website mentioned in the search results.
As with 83% of users, you typically anticipate websites loading in three seconds or less.
That is why faster websites usually perform better in search results, as well as in terms of sales and revenue. They provide the type of user experience that people want and demand. To put this into perspective, did you know that mobile pages that load in less than two seconds have a 15% higher conversion rate?
By providing a fast and seamless experience, you make it even easier for customers to purchase from you.
How to get lighting fast website
Now that you have your site results and understand why a fast website is important, how do you improve your website’s performance?
Compress your files
CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files comprise your website.
If you want to increase the speed of your website, you can compress these files. When it comes to file compression, you have many options. A quick web search can reveal a range of software and websites that offer compression services.
Enhance the response time of your server
Slow response times from your website’s server can have a drastic effect on the speed of your site.
Your server’s response time, which should be less than 200 milliseconds, is determined by several factors, including the following:
- Website traffic
- Page resources
- Server software
- Hosting provider
Generally, you can detect a slow site caused by slow server response times by observing sluggish routing and database queries. Essentially, you’ll want to search for performance bottlenecks that occur through the entire site rather than just on a single page.
Once you’ve established the impact of your server on your site speed, you can begin researching your options.
For instance, you might change hosting providers or upgrade your hosting plan to give your server the necessary resources to handle your website’s traffic and site resources. In the majority of instances, server response time issues can be resolved by your hosting solution.
Compress your images
Image compression is significant for page optimization.
You can compress image files similarly to how you compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. A smaller image file will speed up your site, which can result in all of the benefits associated with a fast website: increased rankings, traffic, and sales.
A browser, such as Chrome, can often cache or store website information to make returning to your site easier (and faster) for users. Browsers can cache a wide variety of files, including photos and stylesheets.
However, the amount of time that browsers store your information is determined by your website.
If you want to increase the load time of your web pages, you can do so by extending the cache settings in your browser. Rather than setting the expiration date of a browser cache for your website to a month, for example, you can set it to a year.
Utilize this website optimization technique only if the site’s architecture is static. If you regularly update the look of your website, you want browsers to clear their caches more frequently to display the most recent version of your site.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A content distribution network (CDN) supports websites that receive traffic from all over the world. A CDN will assist in speeding up the delivery of your site by storing copies of it on CDNs located around the world.
If you want to invest in a CDN, collaborate with your development team to ensure you select the optimal solution for your company. As a service provider of page speed optimization services, Oahu Webmasters collaborates seamlessly with the best CDN providers to ensure you have the best experience possible.
Render-blocking JavaScript
Render-blocking JavaScript will vastly improve the speed of your website.
This is because browsers can parse the HTML on your website before making it for users. If these browsers come across any render-blocking JavaScript code, they will have to execute it, which will increase the speed of your website.
Google recommends the following for the best results:
- Avoiding render-blocking JavaScript
- Using the async attribute for external JavaScript files
- Deferring render-blocking JavaScript
- Inlining render-blocking JavaScript
If you are not a developer, you would need to collaborate with a web page speed optimization agency. They will assist you in optimizing your JavaScript while maintaining the functionality of your website.
Fix your rediriects
Excessive redirects (also known as 301s) can also be detrimental to site speed, which is why you should keep redirects to nonexistent. Redirects slow down pages by initiating an HTTP request-response loop.
MY FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE WEBSITE SPEED
Have you run a site speed test and received a less-than-stellar result? It’s okay; you are not alone.
At Oahu Webmasters, we will assist your company in transforming your website into speedy money-generating assets, providing a fast and seamless user experience across mobile and desktop devices. With a faster website, your business will achieve higher rankings in search results, as well as increased traffic, leads, and sales to help you expand.
If you have any questions, please use this connection to contact us.