The internet is a tumultuous ocean replete with websites engaged in cut-throat competition for consumer attention. With your target audience having a plethora of options at their disposal, your website needs to hook them in the first few seconds.
But if the landing page does not load up within, say the first 3 seconds, chances are high that your potential customer has already chosen another brand. Page speed is of utmost importance in determining your fate in the digital space.
In this blog post, we will shed light on the ways you can optimize your website to facilitate high page speeds and better SEO performance.
What Exactly Is Page Speed?
Page speed refers to the time it takes for a specific webpage to exhibit all its content on the user’s screen. It’s important to note that page speed should not be confused with “site speed,” which refers to the average speed of various sample pages on a website.
While site speed looks at the overall performance of a website, page speed focuses on the loading time of individual pages.
Several factors can impact the speed at which a web page loads. The presence of images, videos, and other media files on the page, the selection of themes and plugins installed on your site, and the coding and server-side scripts employed by your site all play a very important role in your page’s speed. These elements influence the overall user experience of your website.
Why Does Page Speed Matter in SEO?
As a website owner, it is natural for you to ask how important is page speed for SEO and user experience. For you to have a loyal consumer base, you need to give them an experience that is seamless and relevant. Slow-loading pages can be a big deterrent to a user’s flow of work.
To put it in simple words, if your web pages take time to load, there is a high chance that visitors will move on from your site. Sluggish pages can impact your ability to encourage user engagement and drive conversions.
Moreover, the lackluster-performing website will also tarnish your brand’s image! Search engines, like Google, do not place slow websites high in their index rankings. This spells doom on a brand’s visibility. User engagement plays an important role in index-based searches.
So, if you want to make a long-lasting statement with your brand, you need to have a website that functions in the most optimum way possible!
4 Ways To Boost Your Page Speed
You need to ascertain your web pages’ performance before you can go ahead and make changes. There are a few tools, like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights, that can help you gauge your website’s performance in terms of page uploads.
After having assessed the performance, you can decide what needs to be done to improve the overall experience. Described below are 4 ways you can boost your page speed:
Compress Big Images and Videos
A 10-second long video, for example, might compensate for many lines of content, and it also helps engage your audience. But, too many of them might hinder your website’s performance.
A significant portion of web traffic is made up of images and videos, which can take a while to appear due to their generally larger size in comparison to HTML and CSS files.
You can compress and optimize the images and other media components to reduce the load time of your web pages. This could include converting the file types and using either data-reducing or data-preserving compression techniques.
Minimize the Number of HTTP Requests
Your webpage is bound to have assets like images and CSS files. Each of these assets is rendered on the user’s display screen when the browser makes HTTP requests to the server.
This roundtrip between the browser and the server hosting the resource is a time-consuming process. Hence, if, as a developer or a website owner, you can reduce these requests, it will improve your website’s performance in terms of speed.
Concatenating files, using CSS sprites, and inlining small files, can reduce the number of requests and optimize page speed.
Cache Your Web Pages
Whenever a browser sends a request for a web page, the server retrieves the media files, generates headers and footers, and assembles the content. This process can be time-consuming.
Caching can be very effective in mitigating this overhead. It saves copies of the static files like images, CSS, and Javascript used on your website. So, the next time the browser needs these components, it can retrieve them locally, and not ask the server.
ConnectionModel suggests that utilizing caching can reduce Time to First Byte (TTFB) as it decreases the number of resources needed for the server to load a page.
Choose an Efficient Hosting Solution
When you visit a website and load a webpage, you’re essentially interacting with a remote computer, known as the web server. This computer runs programs and stores files that make up the webpage you’re accessing.
The speed of this remote computer directly affects how fast the webpage can be loaded. In other words, the faster the remote computer operates, the quicker you’ll be able to view the webpage and access its content.
Opting for a low-cost hosting option may seem like a great idea at first, but it could ultimately cost you more due to poor performance.
These providers may cram too many websites onto the same server, leading to slow page loading speeds.
Conclusion
All your efforts at developing a website can go in vain if the end-user does not see it on time! What is the point of overwhelming your web pages with terrific videos and images if they do not pop up on the user’s device quickly?
It may seem hard to curb your creative self, but it is very important to be selective in what goes on your website. Moreover, you want to furnish content that is relevant and not gawky and hollow. Right?
So, consider the 4 tactics mentioned in this blog post the next time you sit to design your website!
