Website Speed Optimization: Top Tips to Improve It

One of the most important success factors for your SEO is website speed and its load time. If users are getting annoyed with the time your website take to load completely or having delayed response from any action (click or scroll) then you might lose traffic and conversion opportunities.

In this post, we will talk about website speed optimization and necessary tips you should implement to make it smooth. Apart from this, you should also know certain factors that affect a website’s speed and load times while knowing their fixes.

But before we jump to website speed optimization tips, let’s first have a small introduction about the topic:

What is Website Speed Optimization?

Optimizing website speed is a process to enhance the site’s technical functionalities, such as loading times, images, content, and user experience. It focuses on removing the factors that cause delayed response from a website during a user’s visit.

Website speed includes page load times, response time from any feature to user interactions, and accessibility. Fast-loading website that provide quick responses to interactions results in reduced bounce rates and increased dwell time.

Moreover, search engines like Google prioritizes websites that respond and load quickly. This leads to higher conversion opportunities, especially for ecommerce websites.

As per the reports by Portent:

• Websites with 1-3 seconds load times can attain 3X conversion rates.
• Websites with 2-4 seconds load times can attract 34% conversions.

Website speed optimization includes several aspects that help businesses gain desired results in terms of higher Google rankings, organic traffic, and conversions. But first, they need to know which factors influence websites to slow down.

Key Factors Affecting Website Speed

Here are the top influencing factors that slows down a website load times and responsiveness:

1. Slow server

A slow server can delay the rendering of website content, which means larger load times. Poorly configured servers may cause degraded performance.

Low-quality overcrowded hosting providers can decide your website’s speed. Network overload can slow down the passing of data from the server to the user’s web browser.

2. Huge Image Files

Large, uncompressed images can slow down the time it takes for pages to load. Too many images, and especially large images, will weigh your site down.

3. Too Many HTTP Requests

Each resource–CSS, JavaScript, image–requires an HTTP request that slows page load time. Too many plugins can result in an increased number of HTTP requests and slow your site. Third-party scripts, including analytics and advertising scripts, increase the number of HTTP requests.

4. Slow-Loading Scripts

Slow-loading scripts can have a huge impact on your website’s performance and user experience. Additionally, many script files may increase the number of HTTP requests to be made, thus slowing the page load time.

Upon encountering a script tag, the browser pauses HTML parsing to download and execute the script. This delays the page’s content rendering, which creates an illusion of slower loading.

5. Lack of Browser Caching

In case your website has not used browser caching, it will have to download all resources every time one visits, thus slowing the experience. If the expiration header is set wrongly, resources won’t be cached properly in the browser.

6. Bad Mobile Optimization

Slow loading and poor user experience are some of the problems of websites that are not optimized for mobile devices. Websites on mobile devices should be lightweight and optimized for fast loading.

Internet connections on mobile devices are usually slower than other devices, so it is very important to optimize your website for mobile users.

Conclusively, you have to work towards these factors to avoid any failures in website responses and load times.

Why is Website Speed Important?

A highly important area of modern web development, website speed optimization plays a significant role in influencing website performance and user experience apart from search rankings. Here is a comprehensive overview of why you would need to optimize the website speed:

Impact on User Experience

• User satisfaction: Any site that loads up speedily provides an easy user experience. Users will be made happier to return to the site or recommend it to others.
• Enhanced interactions: If your website loads in less time, most people would like to spend more time on it. They explore various pages and have more interaction with the content.

• More dwell time: A responsive and fast website makes users spend more time on the page and explore it more purposefully.

Impact on SEO

• Increased SERP rankings: Google wants fast sites to rank for search. A better-optimized site will result in increased SERPs, hence more organic visits to your website.
• Quicker crawling and indexing: While a search engine crawler searches and indexes a faster web site, you may even get a better rank by the search engine for such a web site.
• Reduced bounce rate: A low bounce rate means that search engines consider your site to be useful and entertaining for the visitor, giving them good experience.

Impact on Conversion

• More lead generation: Faster websites attract more leads through organic traffic and visitors that slow websites – resulting in higher conversions.
• Minimal cart abandons: The main reason for cart abandonment is when customers have to wait long hours for your checkout pages. Thus, you should make improvements on your checkout process, therefore lowering the chances of abandoning carts.

• Improved customer satisfaction: A better user experience leads to better customer satisfaction and loyalty that can further lead to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth.

The optimization of website speed would lead to a better user experience, higher search engine rankings, and higher conversion rates.

How to Check Website Speed?

It is quite important to have a baseline of your site’s current state before even attempting to optimize it for performance. Several factors decide how fast or slow a page feels to users, from slow loading to reliability failure.

You can identify aspects of your site that would require optimization by understanding how all these factors work hand in hand.

To compare your website’s performance, you have the following metrics:

1. Core Web Vitals:
2. Largest Contentful Paint: The amount of time before the largest content element on a given page loads.
3. First Input Delay (FID): How fast a page responds to the user after input is received.
4. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This is the quantitative measure of the visual stability of a page as the page loads.

• Time to First Byte (TTFB):

Time to First Byte defined as the time interval between when a request to a resource on a Web server was sent and a single byte was received at the web browser.

• DNS Lookup Time:

The DNS Lookup Time measures how long it takes to do a domain name to IP Address resolution.

• Time to Interactive:

This is the time required for a page to fully become interactive, allowing users to start interacting with the content of that page.

From the performance metrics, you will find specific spots where your website needs some improvement. For example:

• Slow Largest Contentful Paint: This is a warning that the largest content element of your page is taking too much time to load. Optimizing the images, minifying your CSS and JavaScript, reducing the number of HTTP requests is the best course of action.

• Slow Time to First Byte: It indicates that the server is quite slow to get back in response to requests. You must, therefore, optimize server configuration and upgrade your hosting plan. You might just need a better CDN at times.

• High Cumulative Layout Shift: This means page elements are moving around as the page loads, so it’s a terrible user experience. You can fix CLS by having no layout shifts, using appropriate size attributes for images, and avoiding dynamic content that changes the layout of the page.

Improving these performance bottlenecks will most definitely improve your website’s speed and user experience.

How to Improve Website Speed?

Another basic aspect of user experience is web page speed, which becomes highly critical for search engine optimization rankings and overall website functionality. Here are some top tips to improve your web page speed:

1. Image Optimization

Reduce the sizes of your images without losing on the quality using built in features inside your CMS. Use a correct image format for particular images:

• JPEG: Excellent for photographs with many colors and gradients.
• PNG: Best for graphics containing large areas of solid colors and transparency.
• WebP: Newer format that sometimes compresses images better than JPEG or PNG.

Ensure that images are in the right size for your web page so they do not unnecessarily load. Resize to actual size they are going to be shown at.

2. Script and file minification

Strip out all the whitespaces, comments, and more such unnecessary characters in all the HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript files. Try combining the number of CSS files as well as JavaScript files from several into fewer numbers as that reduces the HTTP request numbers.

3. Browser caching

Configure your server to set appropriate expiration headers for static resources (images, CSS, JavaScript). This instructs the browser to store these files locally on its own machine, thereby cutting down on the number of requests.

Enable browser caching by storing static resources locally. This cuts down the time taken for loading on subsequent visits.

4. Minify HTTP requests

Reduce the number of CSS and JavaScript files by combing several into fewer ones. Minifying CSS and JavaScript files reduces file size and minimizes load times. Defer non-critical scripts by using asynchronous loading to ensure that page rendering is not blocked.

5. Optimization of server response time

Good hosting can make a huge difference in the speed of your website. You should set up your server to serve requests in the most efficient way possible. A CDN can improve load times by distributing your website’s content across multiple servers around the world.

Reduce the time it takes for your server to process requests. You can do this by optimizing database queries, caching frequently accessed data, and optimizing server-side scripts.

6. Minimizing redirects

They can be of great use if a person needs to change URLs or to do restructuring of the website; however, in case the redirects are excessive, it causes negative effects on the site’s performance. As each added redirection sends out another HTTP request, page loading slows down.

Use minimum redirects, and do not create multiple chaining redirects. Implement 301 redirects for permanent URL changes that tell search engines the content is permanently moved to a different location.

Avoid temporary redirects since they can confuse the search engines and slow the loading of pages. Avoid them unless necessary. Make sure that if redirects are essential, they are set properly so as not to introduce delays unnecessarily.

7. Optimize fonts

Font files are also contributing a lot to the loading time of the website, hence use only minimal font files to reduce the HTTP requests. New font formats such as WOFF2 are better for compression and faster load times. Reduce the font file size by removing the unnecessary characters and optimizing the structure of the font.

8. Use performance optimization plugins

Consider using WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, or Hummingbird in order to automate most of these optimization tasks. However, make sure to configure these with caution so that it does not conflict and affects the performance.

9. Optimize for mobile devices

Make sure your site is responsive and flexible with every screen size. Ensure images are optimized, page weight reduced, and HTTP requests lowered on mobile devices. Let your website remain mobile friendly, or else it may even miss out on user experience and search engine rankings.

10. Monitor and test regularly

Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to test how your website performs on different devices. Continuously monitor your website’s speed under various network conditions, and track certain areas to improve it for optimal performance.

Track Website Performance with RanksPro

Website speed optimization takes time as you need to focus on every crucial factor that can affect it. This guide can help you break down challenges into opportunities for enhancing your website’s speed and overall performance.

However, you can simplify this process by utilizing RanksPro’s website audit feature. It can identify potential hotspots of optimization to assure the page loads faster so that the user experience is greatly enhanced.

Here are the key benefits that come with RanksPro’s website audit feature:

• In-depth Performance Analysis: RanksPro can give you an in-depth view of your website performance metrics, such as time to load a page, server response time, or resource loading.
• Actionable Recommendations: The tool provides some specific actionable recommendations to improve your speed on your website, be it image optimization, code minification, or an HTTP request reduction.
• Mobile Optimization Insights: the tool assesses your mobile performance and flags those areas slowing down mobile load times for you.
• Monitoring and Report: It will continuously monitor and report to you the way your website has performed over a period of time and points out progress or areas to be improved upon.

By using the Website Audit of RanksPro, you can undertake an optimization of website speed from a data-driven standpoint. You can improve your website’s performance highly, enhance the user experience, and boost search rankings.