Website Speed Optimization: How to Do it Best

Is your website loading slower than you want it to?

Slow website speed is a common issue that can impact your online business. It frustrates your visitors and affects your website's search engine rankings. 

With website speed optimization services, you can reduce load times and optimise your website to ensure it runs at peak performance. To understand it better, read our blog.

Understanding Website Speed Optimization

Website speed optimization makes a website load faster, improving overall performance and user experience. It involves several methods and approaches meant to shorten the time it takes for online pages to load, increasing the speed and effectiveness of the website. 

Websites with faster loading speeds typically have better search engine rankings, fewer bounce rates, and increased user engagement. 

This optimization process addresses design elements like website layout and structure and considers technological aspects like server response time, website hosting, image optimization, and decreasing HTTP requests.

Why is Page Speed Optimization Important?

According to research, a user will wait between 0.3 and 3 seconds before losing focus. If crucial information on your website takes longer than that to load, the user will become distracted and may even close the browser window.

Thus, page speed optimization is crucial.

By improving site speed, you can improve overall user experience, reduce bounce rate, boost conversion rates, and rank higher in organic search results.

Ultimately, having a slow website will damage your brand and cost you money. However, increasing the speed at which your web pages load will boost sales, user retention, and traffic.

Factors Affecting Website Speed

Website speed is critical for user experience and SEO ranking. Several factors influence how fast or slow a website loads. Here’s a website speed optimization checklist for you:

• Technical Factors

• Server Response Time: A website's speed is significantly impacted by the server's response time to a request.
• Hosting Environment: The hardware and configuration of servers and their quality impact website performance.
• Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): CDNs expedite page loading times by distributing website content among numerous servers across the globe.
• Image Optimization: Large, uncompressed photos might slow down page loading times. Optimizing photos for the web can greatly increase website speed.
• Browser Caching: By storing static resources in the browser cache, such as CSS, JavaScript, and pictures, you may speed up subsequent page views and minimize server demand.

• Design Factors

• Responsive Design: Websites optimized for various devices load faster and provide a better user experience.
• Clean and Simple Layout: Website loading times are lowered by removing unnecessary items and clutter.
• Fonts and Icons: Selecting lightweight icon sets and typefaces reduces file sizes and speeds up web pages.
• Media Formats: Effective media formats and compression techniques for audio and video files can speed up loading times.
• Third-Party Integrations: Excessive use of third-party plugins and scripts can cause a page to load more slowly. Website speed can be increased by minimizing their use or maximizing their application.

Best Practices for Website Speed Optimization

Website as well as page speed optimization is essential for enhancing user experience and search engine rankings. Here are some of the proven Tips to Optimize Website Speed:

• Use a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network is a collection of web servers dispersed over different regions offering users web content based on location. When a website is hosted on a single server, all requests from website visitors are sent to the same hardware. As a result, processing each request takes longer than before. Moreover, the load time increases when users are physically distant from the server.

User requests are routed to the closest server via CDN. As a result, customers receive content more quickly, and websites function more quickly. This is a rather costly but highly efficient method of load time optimization.

• Move your Website to Better Host

Three different forms of hosting are possible:

• dedicated servers
• shared servers
• virtual private servers (VPS)

The most popular hosting option is shared hosting. It is the most affordable option for launching your website quickly and for a small cost. Selecting a quick web host is crucial for improved site speed and optimization. When you use shared hosting, you share RAM, CPU, and disk space with other websites that use the same server. This is the primary cause of shared hosting's slower speed than dedicated servers or VPS.

VPS hosting is a separate virtual environment housed on a larger server. It can be configured using dedicated resources (CPU, RAM, storage, and operating system).

VPS will be the best choice if your website receives ordinary traffic or if you have an eCommerce site that occasionally experiences traffic spikes.

The priciest hosting option is a dedicated server, which can be your physical server. Here, you employ a system administrator to maintain the server and pay a server fee.

Another approach is to rent dedicated cloud resources from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or another public cloud provider. A hybrid cloud can also be created by combining the two methods. You have complete control over all resources when you use dedicated servers. Under a variety of packages, cloud infrastructures can also offer infinite and on-demand scalability.

Another solution that does away with server setup and maintenance is serverless architecture.

• Optimize the Size of Website Images

Everyone enjoys eye-catching images. When your product pages have a lot of images and visuals, engagement is increased. The drawback is that images are typically huge files that cause a website to load more slowly.

Another popular speed optimization technique, compressing files using tools like ImageOptim, JPEGmini, or Kraken minimises an image's size without sacrificing its quality. 

Although the process could take some time, it is worthwhile. The attributes in HTML responsive images can also modify the picture size according to the user's display characteristics.

• Reduce the Number of Plugins

Plugins are elements that are present on every website. Third parties recommend some features that they add. 

Unfortunately, additional resources are required to execute more installed plugins. The website functions more slowly, and security problems may also arise. The quantity of plugins increases over time, although some may become obsolete. 

You should examine every plugin you have installed and remove any unnecessary ones. First, run performance tests on your page to determine which plugins are slowing down your website. 

The quantity and calibre of installed plugins affect how quickly a website loads. Steer clear of plugins that make a lot of database queries or load many scripts and styles. The best action is to preserve only those essentials and ensure they are updated.

• Minimise JavaScript and CSS Files

If your website has many JavaScript and CSS files, visitors will make many HTTP requests to access specific files. The visitor's browser handles each request separately, slowing down the website's operation. Minimising the number of CSS and JavaScript files will surely speed up your website.

Try to combine all CSS files into one group and all JavaScript scripts into one. As a result, there will be fewer HTTP requests overall. Many tools are available for quickly minifying JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files. For example, you can use the Grunt, Script Minifier, and WillPeavy tools.

• Use Website Caching

When multiple users view the page simultaneously, servers become slower and take longer to send the page to each user. The practice of keeping your website's most recent version on the server and displaying it until it is updated is known as caching. This indicates that the website does not repeatedly render for every user.

The platform on which your website was constructed will determine how you go about caching it. 

For example, you can use the W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache plugins for WordPress. If you have a dedicated server or VPS, you can also utilize caching techniques in your general settings. Generally speaking, webpage caching is not possible with shared servers. 

• Implement GZIP Compression

GZIP is a contemporary file compression standard used by over 50% of websites. It can significantly increase website speed by reducing the quantity of data carried over the Internet by seventy percent.

GZIP compression reduces their content before transmitting HTTP requests and responses to the browser. A browser opens the files and shows the contents on the user's end. Any file on your website can be used with this speed optimization technique.

Other techniques for data compression include Deflate, which is utilized by just 0.6% of websites, and Brotli, which is employed by 39% of websites. 

Find out the options your server can support. If none have been enabled, see your hosting provider's documentation for guidance on what to do next. Keep in mind that your host might not let you use compression. 

However, you can usually minimize files and speed up your website by changing a few lines of code or using a tool (like gzip or Brotli).

• Optimize a Database in CMS

Optimizing databases is a good method to boost efficiency. If your content management system (CMS) has many intricate plugins installed, the database size will grow, and your website will load more slowly. 

For example, the WordPress CMS uses large data storage to store blog posts, comments, and other information. Every CMS has a variety of specialized plugins and calls for different optimization techniques. For WordPress, WP-Optimize might be of interest.

• Detect 404 Errors

"Page isn't found" is what a 404 error indicates. When a page's accessed content is unavailable, the hosting provides this notice to browsers or search engines. Error detection tools and plugins are useful for identifying and fixing 404 errors. 

Adding more plugins will slow down your website. Thus, we suggest using external tools to test the resource, such as Xenu's Link Sleuth or the 404 Redirected Plugin for WordPress.

After identifying every 404 error, you must evaluate the amount of traffic they produce. If they never bring in visitors and never use server resources, you can leave these dead links in place. 

If there is still some traffic for these pages, you might think about redirecting external links and updating internal link addresses.

• Reduce Redirects

Redirects on websites generate more HTTP requests, which degrades performance. We recommend minimizing them or doing away with them completely. 

Initially, you should perform a site scan to find every redirect on your page. Screaming Frog is a useful tool for swiftly locating redirection. Next, you must determine if they are essential and eliminate everything but the most important ones. 

Final Words

If your company depends on its website as one of the primary channels for connecting with customers, website performance optimization will be very beneficial. However, given the wide variations in devices, browsers, operating systems, and connectivity, it can be difficult.

Moreover, remember that this procedure has no definite beginning or end. You do not need to make all of the recommended adjustments right now. Examine the monitoring tool's findings for a while, make the necessary adjustments to the website, and then compare the performance before and after the modifications.

Alternatively, you can approach a website speed optimization service and let the experts do the task while you focus on your core business.