There are a lot of responsibilities when owning a small business.
Since your web presence is vital, you must monitor your website. There are a lot of factors that go into SEO — UI/UX is a major one.
User interface and user experience determine if website visitors want to stay on your page and the duration of time spent on your website.
When it comes to your site's performance, page speed is of the utmost importance.However, unless you understand how this metric works — and, more specifically, the factors that influence it — you may find it difficult to improve.
Before making any changes to your site, you'll need to gauge your web pages' performance. There are various tools you can use to test and measure page speed.
Two popular solutions are Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix, which are both beginner-friendly options.
However, we recommend starting with Google PageSpeed Insights. This is an easy-to-use tool that enables you to measure and test the speed of your web pages on both desktop and mobile devices.Plus, as a Google-supported tool, it can help you make sure you're hitting the performance benchmarks required for high search result placements.
To use PageSpeed Insights, simply enter the URL of the web page you want to test into the text field, and select the Analyze button
PageSpeed Insights will then analyze the content on your page, and score it on a scale of 0 to 100. Below your score, you'll find a list of suggestions on ways you can improve page loading speed
It's worth noting that you'll get a separate score and list of suggestions for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site.This information gives you a solid starting point for gauging how fast your web pages are, and offers tangible actions you can take to improve page loading speeds.9 Quick Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed
Now that you understand the importance of page speed and how to test your site's performance, it's time to work on improving this key metric.With that in mind, let's take a look at nine easy ways to make your pages load faster."
Your site is made up of CSS and JavaScript files. These scripts can load either synchronously or asynchronously.
Synchronously means that the files load one at a time, in the order in which they appear on your web page. With this method, when the browser encounters a script, it will stop loading other elements on the page until that file has been fully loaded first.
Conversely, asynchronous loading enables multiple files to load at the same time, which can speed up the page's performance. Setting this up involves eliminating render-blocking resources. If you're using WordPress, you could either use a combination of the Autoptimize and Async JavaScript plugins to take care of this task easily. You could also go for the most straightforward option and use WP Rocket. The plugin includes three effective features to optimize CSS and Javascript files:
1) Remove unused CSS,
2) Load JavaScript deferred, and
3) Delay JavaScript execution. You only need to enable the options, and the plugin will take care of the file optimization.
Images help enhance the appearance of your web pages and increase the quality of your content. However, large images can also delay loading times. Therefore, one of the easiest ways to increase page loading speeds is to compress and optimize your images. This can include changing their file formats, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images through lossy or lossless compression. By reducing your images' file sizes, you can reduce their ‘weight', ultimately helping your pages load more quickly. There are a variety of image optimization plugins you can use for this purpose, such as WP Smush.
The hosting provider you use plays a major role in your website's management and performance. That includes its page speeds. One of the worst mistakes you can make is settling for mediocre hosting in order to get a lower monthly rate. Cheap hosting often translates to poor performance. It can mean sharing resources between multiple websites on an overloaded server, which can end up straining your page loading times.
Caching is one of the most effective ways to speed up your web pages. Caching stores copies of your site's files, minimizing the work needed for the server to generate and serve a web page to a visitor's browser. Caching your web pages can help with lowering Time to First Byte (TTFB), by requiring the server to use fewer resources to load a page.
Browser caching is another form of caching you can leverage to improve page loading speeds. This technique enables the browser to store a variety of information, including stylesheets, images, and JavaScript files, so it doesn't have to reload the entire page every time a user visits it. Similar to W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket is a powerful caching plugin you can use on your WordPress site. It employs page caching and cache pre-loading to optimize the speed of your pages, and create lightning-fast loading times. WP Rocket is a premium plugin, with a variety of pricing plans to choose from.
Optimizing the way your files load can help improve page loading speed. Similarly, so can minifying your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code. This means removing unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, and other unneeded elements to reduce the size of the files.Decreasing your files' sizes also makes it easier to combine them. The result is cleaner code, and leaner web pages that load faster.Of course, combing through every line of code for each of your site's files isn't exactly efficient.Instead, you can minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML with a free plugin: Autoptimize instead. This popular plugin makes it easy to aggregate and minify your scripts and styles automatically
Too many redirects on your website can really hurt loading times. Every time a page redirects somewhere else, it prolongs the HTTP request and response process.Of course, in some cases redirects may be necessary, such as when you're moving to a new domain. However, eliminating unnecessary redirects on your site can result in significantly lower page loading times. There are a few different ways to reduce redirects in WordPress. One is to avoid creating unnecessary ones when building internal links and menus. Another is making sure your Top-Level Domain (TLD) resolves with a maximum of one redirection.
If your website’s design is complex, it increases your website load time. These include images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.
If you have a lot of content or elements on your website, organize them better.
Create more pages so each requires less load time. Try and use fewer media, or only a couple of pieces of media per page or blog.
Is your website at least 100KB? This is considered a large website. When a website holds more content and enables more features, it requires a larger website. But large and bulky websites load slowly.
What do you do when you send a large batch of files over a medium that only requires small file transfer? You send a compressed file — usually in the form of a zip file.
This compression is quick and sends quickly, right? The same idea applies when you decrease large website load time.
Compression reduces website bandwidth and HTML response. This results in faster website load.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN), also referred to as a ‘content distribution network', is a network of servers that can help improve page loading speed. It does this by hosting and delivering copies of your site's static content from servers located across the globe.A CDN works with, rather than in place of, your host. In addition to the server that hosts your primary website, you can leverage a CDN to distribute copies of your site's files among strategically-chosen data centers.This can maximize performance, by reducing the distance data requests have to travel between browsers and your host's servers. By loading the content for a web page from a server close to each visitor, a CDN helps reduce network latency and produce lower TTFBs (time to first bytes)
Are you not web-inclined? To relieve any frustration, contact a tech support service.
These experts will test your website to find out what’s slowing your website down. While the fixes mentioned are common, an advanced issue might be the case for your slow loading website.
A slow website will inevitably make you angry. Fortunately, these tips are easy to handle. Your web server might even offer some resources to help website load times.
But I understand some website issues are advanced. If you try all of these tricks or are still unsure, a tech support company will be happy to help.
