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In terms of your website’s performance speed of your page is essential.
But, unless you know the way this metric functionsand, more specifically the elements that impact the metric, you might have a difficult time improving it.
To lower your bounce rate and improve your visitors’ engagement, it’s crucial that your website pages load fast and smoothly.
A website optimized for speed, not only improves User Experience (UX) but aid in improving the rankings of your website on search engines.
This article will discuss what speed of pages are what it is, why it’s crucial and how to gauge it. We’ll also provide nine simple solutions that to increase the speed of loading pages.
Let’s get started!
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What is Page Speed?
In simple terms Page speed is the speed at which your content loads when a user goes to a particular page on your website. It is not to be confused with speed on websites as it is the time it takes to load the page.
There are many elements that affect the speed of your page. The most significant are:
- How many videos, images as well as other files of media are available on the page?
- What themes and plug-ins are in use on your site?
- Your website’s (and the page’s) code and server-side scripts
Each of these factors can affect the speed of loading your pages and consequently your website’s UX.
Visitors aren’t the only ones who dislike slow-loading websites as they are much more likely move away from these pages.
What Is The Significance Of Page Speed?
If it’s about loading speed every second is important. In actual fact, Google research shows that when loading times rise by one to 3 seconds, the likelihood of being bounced (the person who leaves the page immediately) rises by 32 percent.
If the website takes 5 minutes to open, then the chance of a bounce is increased at 90 percent.
Also, if your webpages don’t load in several seconds, it greatly increases the likelihood that users will leave your website. Furthermore, if your site’s pages are slow, it could hinder your ability to boost engagement and increase conversion.
Page speed plays an important part in the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google uses a variety of elements into account when deciding on how to rank websites.
Speed is, however, an important factor in ranking both mobile and desktop searches.
Another reason why speed of your website is important is that it influences consumers’ perceptions of your business. If your pages are slow to load, or something happens to go wrong it could cause you to appear unprofessional, making your website appears untrustworthy.
If you’re looking to have an efficient website, then it’s essential to focus on enhancing page speed. The first step to doing that is determining the way your pages are functioning.
How to Determine Page Speed
When making modifications to the website You’ll want to evaluate the performance of your pages. There are many tools that you can employ to evaluate and gauge the speed of your website.
Two of the most popular options can be found in Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix Both are easy to use for beginners.
We suggest starting by using Google PageSpeed insights. This is a user-friendly tool that allows you to evaluate and measure how fast your website pages both on desktop and mobile devices.
Furthermore, as a Google-powered tool, it’s able to aid you in making sure that you’re meeting the performance benchmarks necessary for good results in search results.
To utilize PageSpeed Insights simply type an URL to the website you wish to test into the text box, then click the Analyze button
The Google PageSpeed Report
PageSpeed Insights will then look at the content on your site and evaluate it on a scale from between 0 and 100. After you have the score, you’ll see an array of suggestions on ways to improve your page’s loading speed:
Ideas for improving performance.
It’s important to note that you’ll receive a separate score and a list of suggestions for both mobile and desktop versions of your website.
This data provides the foundation to determine how fast your pages load and provides tangible steps that you can implement to boost the speed of your pages’ loading.
Tips to Increase your Page Loading Speed
Once you’ve figured out the importance of speed and how you can test your website’s performance, you’re now able to focus on improving this crucial metric.
With this in mind, let’s take a the time to look at 9 easy methods to make your websites load quicker.
1. Choose a Performance-Optimized Hosting Solution
The web hosting service you select is a significant factor in the management of your website and its performance. This includes the speed of your website’s pages.
One of the most costly errors you can make is to settle for subpar hosting services in order to secure lower rates for your monthly subscription.
Cheap hosting usually leads into poor performance. This could result in that multiple websites share resources on a server that is overloaded and, in the end, stressing the loading times of your pages.
However there are plenty of hosting services that focus on performance that you can choose from like Site Ground and Kinsta that offer a powerful platform specifically designed for speed.
They typically do not provide shared hosting, meaning that you won’t have to worry about other sites taking up your potential resources.
2. Optimize and Compress Your Images
Images can enhance the look of your website pages and enhance overall quality and value of content. However, images with large sizes can also slow loading times.
Thus one of the most efficient methods to improve the speed of loading your pages is to optimize and compress your images. This could include changing their file formats and enabling lazy loading as well as compressing images with the lossy and lossless compression.
By cutting down the file size of your images by reducing their file sizes, you can decrease their weight, which in turn helps your pages load faster.
There are numerous images optimization plugins that you could utilize for this purpose like WP Smush.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin it will automatically alter the size and compression of your images, without affecting the quality of your images. It comes with tools that enable unrestricted compression and lazy loading and even optimizing large quantities of images.
Another powerful plugin that is a great fit for WordPress web pages is the SiteGround Optimizer plugin. It provides powerful compression options that could reduce your image’s size by as much as 85 percent, without sacrificing the quality of your images.
In addition, the plugin offers the option of using webP as a WebP image format lazy loading, lazy loading, and other features for optimizing images which can dramatically reduce the size of your images and boost the speed at which you load your images. The plugin is free and user-friendly.
In the event that you’re employing WordPress to serve as your CMS it’s possible to consider tinypng.com or Attrock. These will reduce the size of your images between 25% and up to 80%, as well as an app for free on the internet known as Squoosh.
3. Reduce The Redirects You Use
Many redirects on your website could be detrimental to loading speeds. Each time a page is redirected to a different location, it increases your HTTP requests and responses.
In certain instances, redirects might be required for instance, when you’re transferring to a new domain. But, removing unnecessary redirects from your website could result in significantly reduced pages loading times.
There are several ways to cut down on redirects within WordPress. One way is to not create unnecessary redirects when creating internal menus and links. Another thing to consider is ensuring that the Top-Level Domain (TLD) resolves using only one redirection.
If you require assistance in to identify redirects that have been incorrectly installed on your site If you need help identifying redirects that are not properly set up, you can try Sexton’s Patrick Sexton Redirect mapper tool:
It is the Patrick Sexton Redirect tool for mapping.
This will identify the duplicate redirects. It’s also possible to make use of a tool like Screaming Frog to find all redirects on your website and the URLs they connect to.
This should help you to find redirects that aren’t serving a function. After that, you can remove the ones you don’t use by deleting your site’s .htaccess file.
4. Cache Your Web Pages
Caching is among the most effective methods to speed up the loading time of your website pages. Caching keeps the files of your website and reduces the amount of work required by the server in order to create and deliver a website page to the browser of a user.
The ability to cache your website’s pages could help reduce Time to First Byte (TTFB) in the sense of making the server make use of less resources to load the page.
There are a variety of ways to store your website’s pages. It is possible to cache your pages on the server side and your host handles the cache for you.
An alternative is to install an application that caches your pages, such as W3 Total Cache. It is a no-cost WordPress plugin which makes caching your website pages simple and quick. After installing and activating it, just go through General Settings > Page Cache and then select to enable the Enable option.
Additionally, you can benefit from WP Rocket, a powerful caching plugin that improves the speed of loading your website and boost the PageSpeed Insights Score as well as Core Web Vitals in only one or two clicks. Additionally, the plugin implements the majority of web best practices in performance when activated this is the ideal solution to speed up your site and improve the speed of your site.
Another solution that can be beneficial that can be used for the WordPress site is to use the no-cost Site Ground Optimizer plugin, which provides advanced caching technology including the dynamic cache, objects caching caching based on files, and many other settings for caching. These can help your website load up to twenty percent quicker than similar plugins.
5. Allow Browser Caching
Browser caching is a different type of caching that you can use to increase the speed of loading pages. This method allows the browser to save diverse information, including stylesheets images and JavaScript files, meaning it does not have to load the entire page each when a user goes to it.
Similar to W3 TotalCache, WP Rocket is a powerful caching plugin that you can apply to your WordPress website. It makes use of page caching and cache pre-loading to improve the speed of your websites and deliver speedy loading times. WP Rocket is a premium plugin with a wide range of pricing plans that you can choose from.
The caching of browsers is also provided by the SiteGround Optimizer free plugin. It’s simple to use for new and experienced website owners alike.
6. Make use of asynchronous and defer load on those CSS as well as JavaScript files
Your website is comprised from CSS as well as JavaScript files. The scripts are loaded either in asynchronous or synchronous fashion.
It means that your files are loaded one at a time, and in the order they are displayed on your web page.
When the browser comes across the script that is loaded, it will not load other elements of the page until that script is loaded fully.
Asynchronous loading, on the other hand, allows several files to load simultaneously and can improve the speed of a page. The process involves removing rendering-blocking resources.
When you’re running WordPress it is possible to make use of a combination of Autoptimize or Async JavaScript plugins in order to accomplish this job easily.
You can also choose the easiest choice and install WP Rocket. It comes with three efficient tools for optimizing CSS as well as Javascript files: Delete unneeded CSS or JavaScript files, Load JavaScript delayed, and Delay JavaScript execution. All you need to do is enable the options, and then the plugin will handle the optimization of your files.
Another alternative is to use the free Site Ground Optimizer plugin. It has many functions to optimize CSS as well as JavaScript files for the CSS as well as JavaScript combination, preventing the loading of rendering-blocking JavaScript and a host of other features.
7. Reduce CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Making sure your files are optimized for load could help improve your site’s loading speeds. In the same way, it is possible to reduce the size of your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code. This involves removing any unnecessary comments, spaces, characters as well as other elements that are not needed to decrease the size of your files.
Reduced size of your files will also make it easier for you to group the files. This results in more efficient code and web pages that load more quickly.
Of course, going through every single line of code in each of the site’s files won’t be efficient.
You can instead minify the size of your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML using a plugin for free that uses Autoptimize instead. The popular plugin lets you merge and minimize your styles and scripts in a way that is automatic:
It is the Autoptimize WordPress setting of the plugin.
Given the many options and settings available it is possible to configure this plugin to be quite overwhelming initially. To make the process easier, go through this guide on how to configure Autoptimize on your site.
If you want to save work and energy, use using the SiteGround Optimizer plugin that provides effective minification options (among many other features). It allows HTTML, CSS, and JavaScript minification in a single click, making your files more light.
8. Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is also known as a ‘content distribution system is a set of networks of servers which can improve the speed of page loading. It accomplishes that by hosting and sending copies of your website’s static content to servers around the globe.
A CDN is a service that works alongside instead of your host. Alongside hosting your primary site it is possible to use the power of a CDN to share copies of your website’s files to data centers that you have selected.
This improves performance by reducing the distance that data requests must travel between your browser and the hosting server. Through loading content on an internet webpage from servers that is close to every visitor, CDNs help to reduce latency. CDN can reduce latency on the network and results in less TTFBs.
There are many CDN choices to select from. One of them is to select an online provider that offers an CDN you can turn on directly from your dashboard.
9. Eliminate Any Unnecessary Plugins
All plugins are not created in the same way. The presence of too many plugins on your website can result in excessive clutter that can cause slowing down of your site.
In addition plugins that are out of date or not maintained properly can be a security risk and can cause issues with compatibility that can affect performance.
So, it’s a good option to reduce the number of plugins that you employ on your WordPress website.
Of course one of the most efficient methods to accomplish this is to disable and eliminating any plugins that you do not currently use.
It is also recommended to review the plugins that you’ve installed to determine if they’re really needed. There could be a few software that offer overlapping functions and features, as well as others which aren’t suitable for your needs.
