How to Improve Page Speed from Start to Finish
No doubt is there that website loading speed has become a big determinant of the site’s value as well as ranking position. In this digital era, for optimizing your website, page speed is essential to boost. Let’s move further and know the complete guide about page speed along with the important steps to increase it or reducing the loading time. First of all, understand-
What is Page Speed?
Page speed is a measurement of how much time or fast content loads of the website. You can’t define a number to the page speed because it depends on several factors. Page speed is also called the page load time or time for the first byte. It is mainly measured by the two important speed metrics i.e. DOM Content Loaded(DCL) and First Contentful Paint (FCP).
It is easy to evaluate the speed of your webpage via a tool called Google’s PageSpeed insights.
Why Page Speed Matter So Much?
The page speed of a website matters so much because it impacts the success of a website. Do you know that page speed is one of the ranking factors of Google? It is a signal that is used by the Google algorithm for ranking pages. So many reports and research has shown that the slow speed of a web page could negatively affect the indexation of your website. That means you would get the low ranking of your website.
Speed report in Google search console has shown it’s a sign that it is a big ranking factor. Apart from this, Chrome also has announced that it may flag websites that have slow speed. Since 2010, the page speed of a website has been a ranking factor in Goole.
In addition to this, there are several other reasons why digital marketers or businessmen care about page speed. Let’s have a glance at reasons-
- User-experience
- Search engine optimization
- Impact Analytics
What is the most important thing about a website for a successful business is to offer a great customer experience. If the visitors of your website get the fast the smooth experience that would be possible with fast page speed, then they would visit your site again and again. So, it is cleared that page speed impacts the user experience. Also, a faster website has the fast loading time of the analytics tag that means this kind of website receives more visitors. Also, SEO update only impacts the slow websites.
Benefits of fast page speed of your website
- Increase organic traffic
- Boost in the click to visit ratio on ads
- Your website will get high rank in SERP
- Better user-experience
- Receive good customer review
- Overall business grow
Now you have understood how important website speed optimization is. So, let’s move further and know more about how to reduce the loading time of the website and increase the google page speed. But before moving further have a glance at most famous page speed tools that can easily and accurately measure the speed of a website.
Page speed testing and tools
Let’s have look at tools at measure page speed
Google Tools
TestMySite: Great to evaluate the speed of your website vs. competitors.
Page Speed Insights: It is great for providing recommendations. This tool allows a fairly stable test environment that even without any server resources.
Web.dev: It is a wonderful tool for learning about page speed.
Chrome Dev. Tools: Here various features are available via which you can see what and how your webpage is loading.
Chrome user experience report: CrUX is a public dataset of real customer experience.
These are also trusted and famous speed tools-
- Calibre
- Batch Speed
- WebPageTest
- Boomerang
- Speed Curve
- New Relic
- Sitespeed.io
- SpeedMonitor.io
- GTmetrix
- Pingdom and others
With the aid of these tools, you will learn how to improve website performance along with knowing the exact speed of your web page. With the help of these tools, you can also understand a little bit about how to increase website speed in PHP, WordPress or other.
How fast should page speed be?
There is no official threshold about it but a website that loads less than 3 seconds considers the fast site. It has been proved by Google and other studies that almost 53% of mobile visitors leave a website that doesn’t open in 3 seconds. There is no official statement from Google regarding it but is the most general and common thing via which digital marketers and customers measure the website speed. Google always gives a general statement like “Make sites as fast as possible” or “Make sites fast for users” and others.
Ways or Steps to Improve Your Page Speed-
- Enable Compression
- Minify HTML, JavaScript and CSS
- Content distribution network
- Reduce redirects
- Uplift browser caching
- Optimize the image
- Review the hosting plan
Enable Compression:
For reducing the size of files such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and others, you can use the via any software app such as Grip and others. Don’t use this software for compressing the images. For maintaining the quality of the image and reducing the size of them, you can use Photoshop. It is great to optimize images. It will help to boost the speed of your website by reducing the loading time.
Minify HTML, JavaScript and CSS:
Another way for decreasing your website loading time is to optimize your code by removing the commas, space, and other unnecessary characters. It will help you to increase your page speed. For boosting website speed, removing the formatting and code comments.
Content distribution networks:
Content distribution networks are ideal networks of servers that are used for distributing the load of delivering content. It makes your users easily access your content by placing the copies of your site at different geographically data centres. This helps to improve your website speed.
Reduce redirects pages:
Whenever your site page redirects to another page, then it takes extra time of the users and they have to wait until the HTTP request-response cycle complete. The whole process of the page redirects makes the page load slower.
Browser caching:
The browser stores lots of information about the visitors. This may reduce the loading speed of your web page. So, for reducing the loading speed of your website, you have to set your expire header in the browser. It will help to store the information for a limited time period. So, set the time for how long you want that data to be cached as per your choice. This will surely help to quicken your website loading speed.
Optimize the image:
Image optimization is another important step in a way to increase your website speed. You should use the JPEG format for your image. Also, CSS sprites are good for creating a template for images. It will save load time and users don’t have to wait for multiple images to load.
Review the hosting plan:
It is necessary to take the hosting services from a trusted hosting provider. Hosting services from the unreliable source may put a negative impact on your website speed. So, check out the necessity of your website and avail the hosting plan according to that.
Hope you found this guide helpful and effective. If you are not able to boost your website speed, then hire a professional web developer along with an SEO services provider company. This step will help you to touch the height of success in your business by driving huge traffic on your website. When your website speed will be high, then it aids your website to rank high and get more potential customers for your business.
