Tick tock. The clock is ticking. Every extra second it takes your website to load, you risk losing users, alienating your audience, and lowering your chances of conversions. That’s why timing is everything in search engine optimization (SEO).
This post will help you figure out how to speed up your website and improve your SEO and user experience.
So, keep reading to find out more.
Explaining Website Speed
Website speed and page speed, often used interchangeably, measure how fast your website or a specific website page fully opens (loads) for your users.
It makes sense: the faster your site speed, the better your user experience.
Ultimately, you need to get your numbers down to one to two seconds, with three seconds being a sort of cut-off mark where users tend to bounce off your page.
Why Is Site Speed Important?
Apart from being one of more than 200 ranking factors for Google, learning how to speed up Chrome and fast website speed are important for many reasons. Here are a few of the most critical ones:
Bolsters the user experience (UX)
No user likes to be kept waiting because it can be annoying and frustrating. This can affect user satisfaction and engagement levels. You want to encourage them to browse your site for longer (and reduce bounce rates), have more interactions with it, and ultimately, convert instead of heading over to alternative or competitor sites.
Improves SEO performance
Having slow site loading speeds on smartphones and tablets means potentially losing customers, thus detracting from your SEO rankings and performance. The same is true for desktop searches. Slow mobile and desktop searches directly impact your organic traffic and rankings and can impact your average session duration metrics. Therefore, if you want to improve your SEO performance and boost website traffic, focusing on optimizing your site speed is key.
Leads to greater ecommerce growth and higher conversion rates
Ecommerce stores have a particularly strong reason to ensure fast and responsive sites. The faster the web loading speed, the better the UX, and the higher the chances of conversions. Not to mention that you’ll have an upper hand over your competitors. Faster loading times mean greater customer satisfaction and engagement, higher page views, and a gain in conversions; whether it’s direct sales or subscribers you are after.
Page Speed Metrics to Monitor
Page speed is not about sitting at your computer or smartphone with a stopwatch. There are concrete metrics to monitor. Here are the key ones:
- Time to first byte (TTFB): This is the time it takes from a user making their HTTP request to the very first byte that’s received in their browser.
- First contentful paint (FCP): This measures the time from the moment that a first point on a page begins to load until the moment any part of the page’s content is presented or visualized on the screen. It can include aspects such as text, an image, a background image, etc.
- Largest contentful paint (LCP): It’s a measure of time that considers how long it takes for the biggest element on your page to become visible as it loads.
- Time to interactive (TTI) or total blocking time (TBT): The measurement of time when the site becomes fully interactive, including scrolling, clicking, typing, etc. It includes all tasks longer than 50 milliseconds. It shows the levels of unresponsiveness before becoming fully responsive.
- Interaction to next paint (INP), formerly first input delay (FID): The faster the user can interact with your site after taking an action the better. This means the time taken from clicking a button or swiping to the delay before the interaction can be processed.
- Load or onload time: A metric that considers the time it takes for a page to fully load. It includes everything, such as scripts, text, media, third-party resources, etc.
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS): This measures the stability of a page as the content loads on it while layouts shift
Factors Affecting Site Speed
While the page speed metrics above give us some idea of where to look when it comes to speeding up your site, there are several important factors that contribute to slow loading speeds. Here are some that you should consider:
- Web complexity
- Content type and size
- Number of redirects
- Unoptimized images
- Web hosting and server efficiency
- App usage
- Complex themes and/or designs
- Embedded media
- Heavy use of widgets
- Excessive use of plugins
- Page caching and lack of caching
- Traffic volume
- Hotlinking
- Internet connectivity
- Browser choice
- Malware
- Ineffective or unoptimized code
- Unoptimized database queries
How to Boost Your Website Speed
We’ve covered some of the potential problems. Now, let’s explore solutions that work.
Keep redirects to a minimum
Every page redirect results in an extra HTTP request. And every additional HTTP request delays the page visualization or rendering process. Check your site for any unnecessary redirects and eliminate them. Instead, focus on creating clear-cut pathways to your content. An example of a redirect is when an old page points to a new one.
Use plugins sparingly
Remove those that are inactive and which you don’t need. While they can be beneficial with some content, they can also lead to page crashes and even security breaches. The same applies to widgets.
Compress and reformat your images
Luckily, image quality isn’t compromised when it comes to compressing images. Instead, your site will load faster. This is a strong tip for designing e-commerce sites or when you build portfolio sites that often showcase large visual content. In addition, make sure that images designed for desktops don’t have to load on mobile devices. Also, consider converting your images to WebP instead of using PNG, JPG, or GIF files. You may also want to try out lazy loading as an option.
Select a reliable web host
They should be able to handle the size and content of your site with good load times. Their servers should also preferably be physically located close to your audience. While you may want to start out with shared hosting, consider cloud hosting, virtual private server (VPS), or using a dedicated server later on.
Use caching to your advantage
Caching is the practice of storing copies of files in a temporary location. When a user visits your site again, these files are then quickly retrieved because they are stored in their browser’s cache.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN redirects your users to their nearest server and this can directly decrease the distance which the data will need to travel. An added bonus is that CDNs can handle high traffic and protect against DDoS attacks.
Boost your site’s structure and minimize code
Simplify your code and merge multiple scripts into single files. This can refer to HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and minimize the complexity of your web pages.
Other tips to consider
Having covered the basics, here are a few bonus tips you might think about implementing to boost your site speed:
- Design your mobile from a mobile-first perspective
- Reduce the use of web fonts
- Choose a lightweight WordPress theme
- Use external hosting platforms for larger files such as videos
- Prioritize above-the-fold content with lazy loading
- Detect 404 “page not found” errors
- Implement load balancing if your site gets heavy traffic by using more than one server
- Monitor your speed over time and perform speed audits
Conclusion
Overall, site speed is critical for a strong and effective user experience with your website. Whether you have an ecommerce store or your offering consists of SaaS blogs, site speed is not only a ranking factor for search engines. It’s a great way to avoid frustrating your audience and ensure that they are both satisfied and that they remain on your site for longer.
The faster you can deliver quality content, the better for your overall business metrics and website performance. With this in mind, monitoring and taking steps to optimize your website’s speed are essential components of achieving good performance. By following the steps outlined above, you’re on your way to achieving success.
