How to Optimize Your Website Speed for Better Site Performance
As a website owner, we always hope to improve our impression rate, drive more engagement, and boost conversion rate. But often, we are confused about where to start. Do you want to know the key to achieving all this? – Improve your site speed.
This is a common-sense approach since studies prove that slow page loading speed decreases customer satisfaction. Plus, most buyers tend to shift to another website for shopping if your product and checkout pages are unable to keep pace.
It is pretty easy to evaluate your site speed. In fact, Google provides a free tool, PageSpeed Insights, that indicates your overall website performance as scores in various colors – green, yellow, and red. But what do you do if the results are not so good?
If you still feel confused about what to do next, this blog has got you covered. What follows are 17 solid strategies that will supercharge your page load times and offer a satisfactory customer experience.
17 Tactics to Optimize Your Website Speed
- Analyze Your Website
Prior to introducing any changes that affect the way your website loads and manages content, it is better to analyze your current site performance. Of course, this starts with utilizing tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights but consider including firsthand experience in the process too. Access your site using multiple devices and see for yourself how the experience visitors get when they land on your site. Is it smooth and speedy or clumsy and tiresome? The more accurate website performance data you acquire, the better you will be able to spot and fix the existing issues.
- Prioritize Potential Fixes
Once you pinpoint all the existing problems with your site speed, it may be enticing to fix all of them right away. But don’t.
Rather, you should prioritize potential fixes according to what you think matters the most to your site visitors. For instance, if your website takes too much time to load, you need to focus your efforts on fixing this because even if your content also struggles to deliver speedily, it won’t really matter because the page itself takes so long to load, that the visitor gives up and leaves your website only.
- Assess Your Current Hosting Provider
When it comes to your website speed issues, your hosting provider might be its potential source. There are multitudes of factors that might be contributing to these site speed problems, including your hosting provider’s geographical location, their physical infrastructure, and network connection’s overall bandwidth. Other than these, the type of web hosting your site uses, whether shared, VPS, cloud-based, or a dedicated server, can also affect its performance significantly.
Even though shared web hosting stands to be the most economical option available out there, the hosting resources here are divided up among various websites, which eventually reduces the overall site performance. On the other hand, while dedicated servers are more costly compared to shared or VPS hosting, they boost your site speed significantly.
- Consider a CDN
When all the data required to load your website completely is stored in a single place, the page load times are going to suffer. CDNs or Content Delivery Networks store your content’s cached version using multiple servers across multiple geographical locations. When a visitor lands on your website, the CDN picks the server(s) nearest to the user’s location in order to optimize content delivery. However, you must make sure to evaluate various CDNs, as all of them aren’t made equal, to find your ideal fit.
- Optimize Your Images
Sure images are an excellent way to engage your site visitors and improve your website’s impact. But they can significantly affect your page load times, mainly if they are high-resolution images. However, compressing your images before publishing them on your website can help you mitigate their impact on your site performance. Most image editing apps now come with a “save for web” option that provides you with optimized images for websites. However, there are plenty of online tools available that offer options to compress common image file types, including jpeg, gif, png, etc.
- Decrease Total Redirects
Redirects are what sends visitors and search engines away from the page or URL they have clicked initially. While these redirects are a great way to connect high-ranking and high-traffic pages to the recent content you have made, the more redirects you have, the more loading time will be required. This will eventually affect the overall user experience on your website.
No doubt it’s good to utilize redirects initially to keep your content views stable but, be sure to replace the old redirects with new content as early as possible to minimize page load times.
- Limit Your HTTP Requests
Whether for images, fonts, scripts, or stylesheets, each HTTP request increases your website’s overall load times. As your website grows, these HTTP requests start piling up, and gradually it develops a discernible gap between the time a user clicks and the page actually loads.
However, in-browser features like Google’s Developer Tools can pin down all the HTTP requests that have been made by your website and help you determine the old or too complicated requests that you can remove or merge with other functions in order to keep load times short.
- Compression Is the Key
The more you can scale down your image file sizes without ruining its quality, the better your overall site performance will be. There are various methods that you can opt for to compress your files without affecting the user experience. Find out what type of compression your web hosting service is using; if they aren’t using any, it’s time to consider a new hosting provider.
- Cash in on Caching
Caching lets browsers pre-load some of your content to accelerate content delivery. A lot of CMS (content management systems) will cache the latest versions of your website, but you can easily extend this caching timeframe through CMS settings, which is especially useful for content that doesn’t change on your website frequently.
- Monitor 404 Errors
“Page not found” or 404 errors crop up when a person tries to access a page you have either removed or moved elsewhere. Once visitors bump into 404 errors, it is highly unlikely for them to even bother reaccessing your website, which means you lost a potential customer. Use external tools to review your websites in order to monitor these 404 errors and remove dead links.
- Prioritize Mobile Devices
More and more users are shifting to mobile devices to browse the web and shop for products online primarily. There are various reasons behind this shift, the most prominent one being that these devices are readily accessible anytime. Because of this shift, it has become vital to have mobile-friendly websites that load speedily across all devices. While it is possible just to display the same desktop website on mobile devices and hope things will turn out the way you want, doing so usually leads to delayed load times and interactivity problems, leaving the users exasperated. Therefore, it is best to invest in developing a mobile-friendly website with maximum page load times and better response times.
- Streamline Your Content Management System
The right CMS can considerably boost your overall site performance by streamlining content retrieval and offering full options to customize website operations. There are both free as well as paid tools available in the market. So spend some time trying out various CMS to find the one that suits your site best.
- Merge Key Files
If you have expertise in web development, you must be aware that it is possible to merge the sets of CSS and JavaScript files and minimize the total number of steps needed to entirely load your website. Again, you can easily find many tools and plugins to simplify this process further for you and get it done within several clicks only. However, it is worth considering combining key files to boost your load times.
- Ascertain Your DNS Speed
If your domain name server (DNS) takes too long to respond, your TTFB (time to first byte) will be higher, and ultimately, your site load times will be slower. There are plenty of free online tools available to help you compare your DNS provider against other alternatives, which will help you identify different performance issues. While in a few cases, your web hosting provider will also offer DNS services, in other cases, you will have to get these services from different suppliers.
- Choose Nonsynchronous Loading
By default, many functions and files on your site are loaded together, meaning they are loaded in the same order they show up on the page. For instance, elements will only load after the preceding script or service is completely loaded, boosting website loading speed.
However, with the new CMS tools and plugins, it is now possible to opt for nonsynchronous loading for JavaScript and CSS elements, allowing them to load at the same time.
- Select Fewer Fonts
Web fonts are certainly a great way to make your website stand out, but they can also have a negative impact on its performance, particularly if your chosen fonts require unique character sets or are uncommon. Hence, to maximize your page load times, the best thing to do here is to use fewer fonts and focus on the ones optimized for the latest browsers.
- Identify Problematic Plugins
Lastly, identify the plugins that are actually crippling your site performance. Plugins provide an array of beneficial features that can help you in managing your website more efficiently. However, these plugins can also harm your site’s overall performance, even more so if you are using those plugins to load a considerable amount of assets or perform large database queries. So here, the key to optimizing your site performance is straightforward – only keep the plugins that you really need and always use their latest versions.
Conclusions
When it comes to your website, always remember the faster it is, the better.
The bottom line is the faster your website loads, delivers content, and responds, the lower your bounce rates and higher your conversion rates will be.
However, keep in mind that transforming from a slow to a superfast website is not something that happens overnight. But deploying any of these 17 strategies discussed in this blog can help kickstart the process.