Last Updated on May 12, 2022 by Learn Digital Marketing
It’s fascinating how much cool features you can embed on the website these days.
Twitter feed, Instagram feed, YouTube videos, any podcast, and placing infographics – you name it; there’s already a plugin for the dedicated task.
New plugins become available every month that can take your blog or business website to the next level.
However, it all comes with optimization headaches.
Obviously, putting so many elements on your website enforces an added load on storage bandwidth and excels the loading time it takes to call and fetch different media. This delay in loading is primarily attributed to the ever-growing use of videos and images.
However, dynamic elements, sliders, accordions, and other scripts have a decent contribution to it as well. All these items impact your website performance and expand the time it takes to load it.
Why is optimum page speed so important for SEO and Conversion?
A study by Google concluded that a majority of mobile sites and landing pages were too slow to retain visitors. According to this study, mobile sites should be faster enough to make visitors access more pages on the website, engage more, and convert later on.
Another study by Walmart found that every 100ms increase in site speed led up to a 1% increase in revenue.
Moreover, faster website speed can give you better SEO and lower bounce rates. Also, it’s worth remembering that average users can still be limited by their device and download speeds. Huge load times lead to bad UX in general.
All this, of course, doesn’t mean that you should purge your beautiful sliders or hover effects. There are a few simple things that you can do to increase the performance of your websites right now.
Prioritize this in the web design and development phase.
Technical SEO optimization and A/B testing are continuous efforts. It just doesn’t start right after launching your website and doesn’t conclude after one-time On-Page SEO. Issues like slow page speed and improving loading time should be addressed too early in the website planning and development phase.
If you are still developing your website, make sure that this website development’s specification documentation covers this critical factor. Everyone on the design and development team should know how important it really is. This single thing can have a dramatic impact on your finished website when everyone is on the same page.
On the other hand, if you’ve developed your business website and now struggling with performance issues – Take this test.
Did it load almost instantly within a few seconds? Or did it make you worried about seeing it more than right seconds?
“Take care of Page Speed right from the beginning. If your page load speed is way slower than 4 seconds, call up your SEO guy and ask him to run a technical SEO audit and investigate the objects pushing it to load slowly,” recommends Shyam Bhardwaj, an SEO blogger.
Handle image optimization properly.
Images and rich media account for a lot of load time. The first question you should ask here is if it’s really worth putting an image in the first place. The picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes can make a serious point to your visitors. Chopping that high-res photo, however, can decrease load times significantly.
Optimize images that you decide to place. There’s serious science behind it, and you can spend weeks going through docs that cover image compression. Here are a few simple things to remember:
- If you use Photoshop or Fireworks, always use Save for web option.
- Before uploading media files on your blog, you should compress those file sizes to increase page speed.
- If you need an image whose width will be 650px, then don’t upload 2000px and then set the width with a parameter through CSS like “width=’650px’.” Try to crop and resize that image into 650px and then upload it.
- The best format for web images is JPEG and PNG. If you need to use GIF images, try to use this format for only small images.
- Use tools like TinyPNG to compress your images in seconds.
Perfect use of JavaScript:
After analyzing, if you notice that your webpage contains unnecessary javascript files, try to remove them. A lot of javascript files could make your site super slow. Even don’t use a lot of advertisements on one page, which is served through javascript. Try to minify JavaScripts in a single file if possible.
Validate and minify CSS:
I have noticed that many websites’ CSS files are not well-formatted and contain a lot of errors. My suggestion is to validate your website’s CSS codes by using the w3css validator. Also, try to minify all of your CSS files to improve page load time.
Validate and minify HTML:
If you are using any third-party template, then you should validate the HTML code by using the w3html validator. Simply visit the link and put your web address into the address box to validate the HTML of your website. For increasing page load time, you can minify the HTML of your site.
Enable gZip compression:
For compressing your entire web page for fast browsing, you could enable gZip compression. Here is a tool to check if your website is gZip enabled or not. If you can, then you should use a cache system. This will make your web page faster.
Other hecks to increase page speed:
- Turn off trackback and pingback service if you don’t need them.
- Update your blog regularly. Try to keep your blog fresh.
- Clean database logs files.
- Detect broken links of your blog and fix them.
- Moderate comments regularly.
- Try to use fewer redirects in your blog.
- Take care to delete photos you haven’t posted but have uploaded. They won’t do anything for you, and might actually cost you!
- It’s a good practice to review your website plugins once in a while. If you stopped using a plugin, don’t just deactivate it. Delete it as well. Your content management system might check if the plugin is active and increase the load on your website.
Final Note:
Website speed optimization is very important, so you can’t be successful if your website is slow. If your website is slow, then you are surely going to lose both search engine rank and visitors. Nobody will wait for a long time to load a web page. People will go to another site and find their required solution. So now you know the areas to work upon to improve SEO and user experience.