Website speed optimization is a crucial factor in search engine rankings. Google has been very vocal about how slow websites affect SEO. It is important to optimize your website for speed as it will help you rank higher in SERPs and also improve user experience.
In this article, we will provide the complete guide to website speed optimization and how it affects your SEO. We will also discuss various tips and tricks that you can use to make sure your site loads faster.
Websites are getting more and more complex, which makes it challenging to optimize for speed. However, there are some simple things you can do to make your site faster and keep your visitors happy.
A slow-loading site means visitors will quickly bounce off the page, never to return. In this post, we’ll show you how search engines rank sites based on their performance and what you can do to optimize for speed without sacrificing content quality or design.
How Does Website Speed Affect Your SEO?
Google says page loading speed has become a direct ranking factor for mobile searches. It will become a ranking factor for all pages when Google releases its Core Web Vitals Update in May 2021.
Google, as well as other search engines, is quick on ranking pages that offer a great user experience.
The speed of the SEO page is important and significantly impacts the user experience. Fast loading pages make it easier for users to navigate your website. A fast loading web page reduces the bounce rate of the website which is good for your SEO score.
Optimize your page because it is important for the brand. If your website is well-optimized speed will impact your ability to drive engagement and conversions.
How to improve your website page speed?
We hope now you can understand the importance of page speed. Now it’s time for website speed optimization.
How to test website page speed?
Before making any changes to your website, you need to test website page speed. There are many online tools to test website performance.
However, we recommend starting with Google PageSpeed Insights. It is easy to use, enabling you to measure and test website performance on desktop and mobile devices.
To test website performance in PageSpeed Insights, paste your website URL into the search field you want to test and click on the Analyze button.
The tool will analyze your website content and score it on a scale of 0 to 100. It will show a website error that breaks your website performance.
Understand all the errors and start changes on the website to improve website load speed.
Optimize Website Page Files for Maximum Performance
Most developers make one mistake they leave unnecessary code on the website pages. That code impacts your website performance.
There are many important points to keep in mind during the development of the website:-
- Remove unnecessary spaces to reduce the number of lines on the web page.
- Don’t use extra HTML elements when you are writing HTML for the web page.
- Don’t use inline CSS in the HTML tag.
- Always write the HTML in proper formatting.
- Keep CSS and js in separate files to reduce page load time.
- Write JavaScript code before closing </body> tag.
- Compress all CSS and js files before uploading to the live website.
- Don’t leave blank code or property in the CSS file and JavaScript file.
- Most of the time some JavaScript needs to load after the web page loads so always use the defer or async attribute in <script></script> tag.
Above are some important points that will help to reduce page file size. That improves your web page performance.
Optimizing Images for Faster Page Load Time
Images contribute to improving the appearance of your web pages and quality of your content. However, large images also increase your web page loading time.
You can’t remove the large images to reduce web page load time. Therefore, another easiest way to reduce page loading time is to compress and optimize your images.
According to Google PageSpeed Insight use webp or jpeg format on the web page to speed up performance. You can convert jpg and png images into the web format online.
If you want to convert more than 100 files we suggest installing Romelight WebPconv.
Implement Lazy Loading for Defer Offscreen Images
“Defer Offscreen images” is an error when you analyze web page in Page Insight. That error impacts the web page performance.
Google recommends using lazy-loading and hidden images after all critical resources have finished loading time to interact.
If you are using a WordPress CMS there are many plugins to implement lazy loading.
- Lazy load by Wp-Rocket
- A3 Lazy Load
- Smush
- Autoptimize
- Lazy Loader
You can implement lazy load in an HTML web page. Below are some Javascript libraries that we recommended you to apply on your web pages for better results.
- Lozad
- Progressive Image Lazy Loading
- Vanilla Lazy load
- YouTube Lazy Load
Scaled images on the web page
Served images at scale optimized images by rearranging them to the perfect size – not too small, not too large. A scaled image is an image adjusted to the exact size required on the Web site.
If you use a small picture to fill a larger area, it will be blurred when you zoom in. However, if you use oversize images, the browsers will shrink them to fit the given dimensions, but the image sizes will remain unnecessarily large.
For example, if you use a 800 x 800 px image for a 80 x 80 px for a block, the browser has to download and scale the picture down before displaying it to users. This process is inefficient and will delay the time it takes to load the website.
However, this problem won’t occur if you serve scaled images.
How to find Serve Scaled Images
Enter the URL web page in Google Page Insight, it will show an error like Properly size images. Click on the tab, it will show images that are not the proper size.
Make images in proper sizes and reduce your web page load time.
Optimizing Server Performance for Maximum Efficiency
Optimizing server performance is important in supporting user requirements. Server optimization is a specific technical process. It is used to enhance data processing efficiency and application setup as well as overall performance.
You have to select the best performance server that helps in website speed optimization. It is most important that you have to keep in mind before buying a server.
Enable Caching to Reduce Load Time
Caching is one of the best ways to reduce load time when optimizing web pages. When you enable the caching it can increase your web page performance upto 50%.
It helps to save server response time to fetch the files from the server. Retrieving the database, rendering application code, and appearing results on the HTML page when the user refreshes the page.
Start Optimizing Your Website Today to Give It an Edge Over Competitors in Search Results.