Your website is your most powerful conversion tool. But if it isn’t optimized correctly, you may be pouring hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars into maintaining it each year with very little ROI. The right website optimization strategies help you transform your website into a conversion powerhouse that brings in leads, entices them to explore your site, and eventually convinces them to become loyal, paying customers.
Here are some suggestions:
HOW TO SPEED YOUR WEBSITE, 7 TIPS
As you’ve seen, there are a lot of factors that influence how long it takes to load each page on your website. But there are just as many ways you can improve the website speed. Here are a few examples:
Reduce the number of HTTP requests
HTTP requests are used by the web browser to fetch different parts of the page, like images, stylesheets, and scripts from a web server. Establishing a connection between the browser and the remote web server will incur some overhead with each request, particularly when using HTTP/1.1. Furthermore, browsers usually have a limit on the number of parallel network requests, so if you have many requests queued up, some of them will be blocked if the queue is too long.
Your first step should be to eliminate requests that are simply unnecessary. What is the minimum render time required for your website? Find that out, and load only the necessary external resources.
You should remove any unnecessary images, JavaScript files, stylesheets, fonts, etc. If you are using a CMS like WordPress you should remove any unnecessary plugins as they often load additional files on each page.
Now that you have trimmed everything you could, the next step is to optimize the rest. You should look into compressing your CSS and JavaScript files. Optimized websites frequently load all required JavaScript and CSS in a single request. You can use Sematext Experience to monitor and find HTTP requests and resources that take a long time to load for your actual users.
Optimize images sizes
Graphics are used extensively on many websites. If your images are not compressed, or if you use too high of a resolution it will slow down your website’s performance.
For example, websites sometimes use images with 2x or even 3x resolution so they are displayed well on high-density displays such as retina screens. However, if your visitors do not use a HiDP display, you are only wasting bandwidth and causing them to wait longer for the page to load, particularly if they are using slow mobile data connections. You can read this MDN guide for using responsive images correctly. Specifying multiple image sizes will allow the browser to select the appropriate image based on screen resolution.
When you are certain that you are loading the correct resolution across all device types, then it’s time to optimize the size of the images.
Also, make sure you use the right file type! For images with a lot of colors, like photos, use JPEG; for simpler graphics, use PNG.
Write mobile first code
The world is being consumed by mobile devices. Or so I am told. Using a RUM solution like Sematext Experience or even your preferred website analytics tool (such as Google Analytics), you should determine what your users are doing. Google Analytics) just in case.
Usually, developers write and test websites on their own desktop devices, and only later they optimize the website for mobile devices. This can often be a painful process, depending on the choices made while writing the website.
The chart shows the difference between Mobile and Desktop load time performance
But what if, while testing the website we used mobile devices (or emulators)? That way we would write for mobile first. The experience would be by default optimized for mobile devices.
Then adjusting the website for desktop devices would be a more straightforward process. We can progressively enhance the experience for devices with more power and screen real-estate. Just remember to also throttle the network and CPU to better simulate the experience of mobile users.
Choose the right hosting service plan
This ties into the previous point about minimizing time to first byte. If you are using a shared web hosting provider, then it’s very likely that the overall performance will be subpar. You should look into upgrading the hosting service plan or if you are using WordPress, consider using a managed service that is well known for stable and high-performance hosting.
You have three main options (plus a bonus one) for hosting:
- Shared – traditionally the cheapest of the hosting options is a way to share the resources of the server with other customers.
- VPS – a virtual private server is significantly faster than a shared host but instead of using just one machine it uses multiple machines.
- Dedicated – dedicated servers are obviously the most expensive of the three and with this one, you basically rent an entire machine that can be usually configured to your wildest desire.
- Serverless – as of late, serverless has gotten a foothold in server space as it offers unmatched scalability at a fraction of the cost.
Of course, as always, you should measure your performance first before making the switch.
WHAT AFFECTS SITE SPEED
There are a number of reasons why your site load time might be lagging. It could be anything, but the most prevalent variables are:
- Heavy CSS and JavaScript use
- Plan for the server and hosting Large image sizes
- Not using browser cache
- Too many widgets and plugins
- Hotlinking images and other resources from slow servers
- Traffic volume
- Older browsers
- Slow network connection (mobile devices)
That means there is a whole range of steps you can take to enhance page speed. But before you start troubleshooting to improve website performance, you need to test your page load time.
If your business relies on your website as one of the primary channels for reaching your customers, improving your website’s performance will have a significant positive impact on your business, even though it can be challenging due to the wide range of devices, connectivity options, browsers, and operating systems. Additionally, keep in mind that this procedure lacks a clearly defined beginning and ending. You don’t have to implement all of the suggested changes today. Spend some time looking into the monitoring tool results, make changes on the website, and then compare the performance before and after the changes.