A fast website is essential for a user-friendly experience, as well as improving your rank in search engines. Use our 10 top tips to speed up your website and make sure you arent missing out on valuable leads and potential customers.
What is site speed?
Site speed refers to how fast your website loads when a user is visiting the page in their browser.
Site speed can vary depending on a number of factors, such as:
- The resolution, dimensions, and number of images on the website
- Excess visual elements, animations and transitions within your website design.
- The size of the pages on your website
- The number or size of special plugins or applications installed on your website.
Sometimes when a website loads slowly, it’s a user issue such as connection troubles. If you think your website is loading slowly, you should take steps to test the speed of your site and make improvements in order to make the website faster.
Why does site speed matter?
Improving your website speed can help you make a great first impression on your first-time users. From there, a fast site it makes it easy for you to encourage them to stay and explore, and even convert into a customer.
10 ways to speed up your website
There are many ways to speed up your website, from technical aspects like compressing code to visual adjustments like serving images in a WEBP file format. Here are our top 10 ways to speed up your website:
1. Compress and scale images
Large images served in a high-quality format can take a toll on your website speed. Your browser often struggles to handle loading multiple high-resolution images, especially if they take up a large portion of your website.
To help reduce the size of your images, you can optimise them to make them smaller in size, and change attributes such as file type, dimensions, and resolution.
With lossless compression, you can compress your files to be served to your users, but enable recovery if needed. This way, if you need to restore the image if you need to. This method compresses your files less than lossy compression does, but the method is less destructive.
Lossy compression means the image is compressed permanently, with no way to recover the lost data after decompression. Read more about lossy vs lossless compression.
2. Serve images in next-gen formats
Along with compressing and scaling your images appropriately, you can present them in formats that are friendlier to browsers such as WebP, JPEG 2000, or JPEG XR.
These files have better compression and quality characteristics than the classic PNG or JPG. Serving images this way – especially large ones – can help browsers to load your website quickly, improving your SEO score and helping your customers navigate your site easily and efficiently.
You can use a file converter such as Convertio to save your images as WebP files or install an additional application within your website to convert your images in bulk or automatically. If you use WordPress, then Smush Pro is a great tool to convert your images in bulk, as well as compress and scale them to make your site even faster.
3. Minify and combine CSS and JS files
Removing or compressing unused or unnecessary parts of your website code is a great way to make your website load faster.
By removing unnecessary characters, spaces, comments, and other unneeded elements, you can reduce the size of the files sent to the browser and speed up your website. Your users will thank you, and Google will appreciate it when crawling your site too. If you use WordPress, you can install a plugin like Hummingbird to help you minify and combine CSS files.
4. Defer loading for CSS and JS files
The CSS and Javascript files that your website is made of are sent to the browser and loaded when your user visits your site. These files can either load synchronously or asynchronously.
When your files load synchronously, it means that the files load one at a time. Your files will load in the order in which they appear on your page. By loading your files synchronously, your browser will stop loading other elements on the page until the current script has been fully loaded.
Asynchronous means that the browser will load multiple files at the same time, which may speed up the page’s performance. Setting this up involves eliminating render-blocking resources, which can be a common diagnostic in Google PageInsights. If you use WordPress, you can use install plugins to achieve this.
5. Use caching
Using caching can significantly reduce the amount of data that the server transfers to the browser, shortening the loading times for users who frequently visit certain pages.
The browser cache is a temporary storage location where browsers can save copies of static files so that they can load recently visited pages much more quickly. Doing this avoids taking the time to request the same content over and over again.
Web developers can instruct browsers to cache elements of a webpage that will not change often. With WordPress, this can be done with plugins such as Hummingbird, or Litespeed Cache, which have been developed to help speed up websites.
6. Avoid large network payloads
Pages or posts which are too long and contain large attachments can cause a strain on the user’s browser and cause them to leave quickly.
Breaking up your pages and posts into smaller, more manageable loads can increase the page speed for your user. Additionally, it can encourage your users to engage and click on your links and buttons.
Using Lazy Load can also help reduce the size of the network payloads. Lazy load defers loading of non-critical resources at page load time. This means that the browser will load the most important content first, and the less important content later while the user is busy consuming your content.
7. Remove unnecessary plugins or applications
Keeping unused and unnecessary plugins on your website can slow down your website and affect your users in a negative way.
You should regularly check your plugins and applications for updates, unused items, and discontinued programs. You can also evaluate the size of the plugins installed, and opt to replace large ones with smaller ones that serve the same function.
8. Remove unused images and files from your media library
If you’ve recently undergone a website redesign, you might end up with a lot of unused media taking up space in your media library or CMS. Your website could be loading unused images, even if they aren’t presented on your website. Take the time to clear out the images that aren’t necessary, or that your site isn’t currently using.
Not only will this make your files easier to navigate and less cluttered, but it can improve your website speeds.
9. Upgrade or change your hosting provider
It can be hard to hear, but sometimes it’s not your website that is the problem – it’s where your website is hosted. Your hosting provider can account for some slow speeds when users are visiting your site.
It’s a good idea to review your hosting plan and company and decide if they are the right solution for you. Oftentimes, the cheaper hosting solutions are not as performance-based as the higher-end options, and you can miss out on fast speeds when you pay lower prices.
If you’ve tried everything to speed up your site and it just isn’t working, it might be worth investing in a web provider which is performance-based and doesn’t offer shared hosting.
10. Minimise redirects
If you notice your website is using a lot of redirects, you should aim to reduce or even eliminate unnecessary redirects as they can slow down your website. Take care to avoid setting up redirects when they aren’t necessary, and regularly check your pages and posts to ensure they aren’t interrupted by redirects to other places.
Summary
There are many ways you can speed up your website, including:
- Compressing and scaling images
- Serving images in next-gen formats
- Minify and combine CSS and JS files
- Defer loading for CSS and JS files
- Use caching
- Avoiding large network payloads
- Removing unnecessary plugins or applications
- Removing unused images and files from your media library
- Upgrading or change your hosting provider
- Minimising redirects
Reducing the speed of your website benefits both the user and the website, as increasing the speed and optimising your website can improve your SEO and help your Google rankings.
Performing a speed test and taking action on the elements of your site slowing it down leads to happy users and improved rankings, which is a win-win you need to be taking advantage of.
