As you read on, we'll talk about why you should speed up your website, which includes improvements on user experience, search engine rankings, and practical tips for optimization.
- Slow website speed can negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings, as visitors may leave if pages take too long to load.
- Factors affecting site speed include unoptimized JavaScript, CSS files, and large images, which can increase loading times.
- Improving site speed involves using tools like PageSpeed Insights to assess performance and implementing suggestions such as optimizing image sizes.
- Focusing on website performance, especially on mobile devices, is crucial due to the high percentage of users accessing sites via phones or tablets.
Wondering why your website is ranking so poorly on search engines despite making it look amazing with all the bells and whistles to offer the best possible user experience to your visitors?
Well, simply put, your website might be too slow. Moreover, by adding a ton of plugins and features, you might think that you made improvements on the usability of your website, but instead made it so slow, that people just don’t want to wait through the loading time and leave before they even get to experience its true glory. All the extra functionality and assets also directly impact your Core Web Vitals performance.
In this post, we’ll discuss why you should speed up your website and how to do it. Furthermore, we should clarify that site speed refers to how quickly a browser can load the entire webpage a visitor lands on.
Why is site speed important?
As we mentioned before, pages that take too long to load may cause frustration to your visitors, making them want to close out of your website before it even finishes loading. We can also quantify this phenomenon by measuring the bounce rate, where we can see the percentage of visitors who left your website after viewing only one page.
Therefore, site speed should be at the forefront of your mind, when you’re making an effort to create the best possible first impression for your visitors.
As for search engine rankings, you should keep in mind that Google prioritizes serving relevant information as quickly as possible. Understanding which metrics to target in Core Web Vitals helps focus your optimization efforts. Furthermore, you should especially focus on your website’s performance on mobile devices, since more than half of people accessing the World Wide Web do it via their phones or tablets.
What factors affect site speed?
As we mentioned above, one of the major factors affecting site speed is the amount of resources a browser needs to fetch to load your web page completely. We can count large unoptimized JavaScript and CSS files and high-resolution, uncompressed images and videos. These tend to contribute to enormous network payloads that slow down your site.
You should always keep in mind that nowadays high-speed internet access isn’t all that rare anymore, which means that when it comes to site speed, every byte matters if you want to gain an advantage over your competitors.
Therefore, all those files together add up when it comes to getting it all loaded on your visitor’s screen, and should be managed carefully to minimize their overall weight. Techniques like minifying JavaScript and removing unused CSS can help reduce file sizes.
Another important factor that we should consider is that, although the majority of users might have a fast internet connection, there will be some that don’t. And for those few, the site slowness will be far more noticeable when your website loads unoptimized files to their screen.
How to improve site speed?
To even know where to start, you should first measure your website’s performance. One such tool that can give insight into that is PageSpeed Insights, which is also one of the most popular tools.
Furthermore, you can get all sorts of information from testing your website’s performance with this tool, like scores for metrics that measure various aspects of a page’s performance along with suggestions for making improvements on it.
Therefore, it’s a perfect tool that can guide you through the initial steps toward making your website more optimal for browsers as well as making it more user-friendly. You can also measure rendering time using Chrome Dev Tools for detailed performance analysis.
We’re also going to mention what these steps might be and what they entail here.
Optimize images
Images are one of the largest, if not the largest piece of content that get loaded on page load. Therefore, it’s sensible to optimize their size without sacrificing their quality.
Moreover, we can achieve this by adjusting image dimensions to the screen size, so when a visitor uses your website with their phone, the images load with already adjusted dimensions that fit on their screen. This will also dramatically reduce the size of the images.
We can even further optimize images by converting them to modern formats like .webp and compressing them, to achieve the smallest possible size. Learn more about efficiently encoding images for optimal compression.
Limit number of HTTP requests
Another thing we can focus on is the amount of requests a browser has to make to fetch all resources to load a web page. To clarify, when a browser fetches a resource from the server your website is hosted on, it first has to send a request to the server and wait for the response, which either comes with resources if it’s successful or an error if it isn’t.
Therefore, if there are too many requests needed to load the page completely, it may cause your site to be slow. So, what you should focus on is eliminating all the unnecessary requests, which might include reducing the number of different fonts you use on your website, bundling JavaScript and CSS files. This helps avoid enormous network payloads.
Use browser caching
Making use of browser caching can dramatically improve the user experience of your website. To explain, the browser caches copies of static files from a webpage a user visited and stores them locally. Therefore, it doesn’t need to send requests to the server to get those files and instead just loads them from cache, making page load quicker.
Learn how to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy for optimal caching setup.
Delay or defer render-blocking JavaScript files
Render-blocking JavaScript files are those that execute before the main content of the page, which causes a long page load and can quickly become frustrating for users to wait through that, making them close out of your website entirely.
So, if you load them after the main content loads instead, it will appear as if your website is fast while running those long tasks in the background unnoticed.
This technique helps reduce JavaScript execution time and improves perceived performance.
Minify CSS and JavaScript files
This step is not going to contribute a lot to making your website faster, however it’s still considered to be good practice. To explain, by minifying CSS and JS files, we basically remove white space like spaces and indentations, since those are there for readability purposes for people who develop them.
See our guides on minifying JavaScript and removing unused CSS for detailed implementation.
Hire an expert
You can ensure improvements on your website’s performance by hiring someone, who is more knowledgeable about all the tricks that make a website faster. Furthermore, you can also benefit yourself by saving the time you would need to learn and research everything on your own.
Conclusion
To conclude, we went through why exactly a site speed is important, what affects it and how you can improve it. The steps we mentioned above are definitely a good starting point and may solve your problems altogether, but if you’re not sure whether to do it yourself or not, you can always find someone to help you with it.
