How to increase web page speed?
In today's digital world, the loading speed of a website has a significant impact on consumer decisions and behaviour. You can have an eye-catching website, but if it takes forever to load users will choose another alternative. Slow loading speeds can be caused by many factors. In this article, I will give you 8 tips to help you improve your website's performance and loading speed.
But let's start at the beginning.
Why is website loading speed important?
Research shows that consumers maintain their attention from 0.3 – 3sek. If your page takes longer to load, the user will lose focus and will most likely leave your page.
Websites that are fast will result in lower bounce rates, higher conversions, higher positions in Google results and of course a better user experience.
What determines how fast a website loads?
There could be many different reasons for your website's slow loading. Here are some of the main ones:
- Intensive use of CSS and JavaScript.
- Poor choice of server or hosting plan
- Large image/photo files
- No using browser cache
- Excessive integrations
- Linking images and other page sources to slow servers
- Heavy user traffic
- Older generations of browsers
This list shows that there are many different factors that contribute to the loading speed of a website. But before any improvements can be made, the first thing to do is to test the speed of the site itself with „Google PageSpeed Insights“
It is important to know the current situation before making any changes. By tracking various indicators, you will be able to monitor and measure whether the changes are working, which decisions are working and which are not.
There are many measurement indicators that you can monitor and track. I would suggest the following key ones:
- Largest Contentful Paint - measures page load performance. The LCP takes into account the first 2.5 seconds of page loading.
- First Input Delay – measures the time between the user's initial action on a web page and the moment the browser starts processing the action.
- Cumulative Layout shift – assesses the visual stability of the page.
Tips for increasing page speed:
1. Reducing HTTP requests.
HTTP užklausas interneto naršyklė naudoja įvairioms puslapio dalims, pvz., paveikslėliams, dizaino elementams gauti iš serverio. Sujunkite kelis failus, kad sumažintumėte serverio apkrovą ir sumažintumėte pridėtines HTTP užklausas.
Pašalinkite visus nereikalingus paveiksliukus/nuotraukas, JavaScript failus, stilių rinkinius, šriftus ir t.t. Jei jūsų naudojama turinio valdymo sistema WordPress, rekomenduojama pašalinti nereikalingas integracijas. Kur galite pamažinkite CSS ir JavaScript failus.
2. Images optimization
Most websites use too large image/photo files. If your website's images are not in the right format or use a high resolution, this will definitely slow down your website's loading speed.
For example, website images with 2x or 3x resolution are displayed in high quality on high resolution screens (such as Retina displays). For users browsing on lower resolution screens, your website photos will take much longer to load.
It is recommended that you specify size attributes for images/photos so that the browser can select the most appropriate image for the screen size. Also, image files should not be too large, ideally up to 100kb.
The format of the images is also important! If you are uploading logos, choose SVG, but for all other cases I would recommend WebP. The WebP format has flexible file reduction options and is ideal for optimising page loading speed.
3. Mobile-friendly website
Most users browse the internet on mobile devices. That's why it's important to optimise your website for them. Users expect the website to load in less than 2 seconds.
Optimising your website for mobile devices means that it will automatically adapt to any screen size, whether you're using a mobile phone or a tablet.
There are also other pluses to optimising your website for mobile devices. One of them is that Google considers mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. Mobile-friendly websites rank higher in Google searches. Another plus, better user experience and, of course, increased website performance.
4. Choosing the right hosting plan
At first, it may seem that hosting is only needed to make a website visible on the internet. However, the choice of hosting determines other aspects of a website, such as user experience and SEO performance, as well as security.
The right hosting ensures fast data transfer, reliability during load times and fast website loading.
5. Reducing plug-ins
Plug-ins or integrations are reusable pieces of functionality commonly used in content management systems such as WordPress. Plug-ins provide additional functionality to a website, such as analytics capabilities, leaving comments on blog posts and more.
Integrations add functionality, but they also have their downsides. Each plugin adds additional CSS and JavaScript files, which adds extra loading time on the server each time the web page is loaded.
I would recommend checking all the existing plugins on your website and assessing whether each of them is needed and used on your website. Delete all unused integrations.
6.Use Website Caching
Caching is the process of storing versions of files in a temporary repository - a cache - that can be accessed more quickly, thus speeding up the loading time of a website.
The performance of a website depends on proper caching. Without it, each user request (e.g. selecting a category in a list of products) requires a complex process: the server has to extract the data from the database, perform calculations and return the result to the browser and the user.
When a website has a large number of visitors at the same time, the continuous execution of such requests can put a heavy load on the server and can significantly slow down the loading and running speed of the page. Caching solves this problem effectively.
During the first page load, the caching mechanism saves a static copy of the content or the extracted data according to a predefined time. This means that repeated requests for the same content do not need to re-execute all the programming logic - the system simply delivers the ready-made, previously saved programming code.
7. CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is an optimised network with servers all over the world that hosts your files, increases the loading speed of your website and reduces the load on your website's server.
A CDN allows you to store your website information on servers. It is recommended to host your photos, videos, CSS, JavaScript and any other static website material on a CDN. Your website visitors connecting from abroad will load the website from the server closest to them (not necessarily Lithuanian). This improves your website loading speed, user experience and SEO performance.
There are many CDN options: Amazon CloudFront; Akamai; Bunny and so on. We would recommend Cloudflare.
8. Reduce redirects
Redirects - redirecting a web page. It is perfectly normal for a website to have redirects, but make sure that the redirect pages do not lead to another redirect page. This increases page loading time and is not considered good SEO practice.
In conclusion
The loading speed of your website is crucial for retaining users on your website. Loading speed depends on many aspects. It is most important to test the speed of your website before you make any changes, so you can track the results and progress of various changes.
Installing a CDN, caching, choosing the right hosting can not only speed up the performance of your website, but also give it additional security against virus attacks and hacking.
