To be able to stand out from your competition, it is necessary that you reach out to your potential clients in the right way. Thus, it goes without saying that the best way to do some solid outreaching would be by having a web page that can engage your clients and put your products and services out there in the world.
Since there is no business that runs without a website these days, what matters is how you optimise your website to reap the best out of it. If it is taking too much time for your website to load its pages, you might lose your potential customers.
However good your SEO game is, if your website has slow load time, the strategies won’t be of any use. Therefore, having a fast page to thrive in the digital world is immensely necessary.
Having a website is not going to do the trick unless it gains more traffic and results in a substantial conversion rate. So, first things first-
What Is Website Speed Optimisation?
Website speed optimisation is the practice of improving the site’s speed and performance, usually to improve the user experience and ranking of Google search engine result.
Also, it is designed for businesses to increase conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and enhance website visitor experiences.
Numerous researches shows how site speed is related to other important metrics. It helps with your SEO practices, and if a website’s load time is less, the conversion rate will be.
What Is Page Speed?
Site speed and page speed are both different. Page speed is the speed with which a web page loads and presents its content to a user. In other words, it refers to how rapidly users can access the content of your web page.
Page speed reflects the loading time of a every page on your site. A fast page speed can boost user engagement and experience, and Google rankings.
Page speed is affected by various factors, including the number of media files, including video and images on the page, the plugins and themes implemented, and the site’s server-side script and programming.
Why Should I Optimise My Page Speed?
Time is precious, and that applies to websites as well. Multiple studies have shown a higher chance of a rise in bounce rate when a website’s loading time increases. Thus, the bounce rate rises to 32% if the website loads in up to 3 seconds.
The bounce rate might increase by about 90% if it is up to 5 seconds. If the loading time is between 1 and 6 seconds, the bounce rate will increase by 106%, and if it is between 1 and 10 seconds, the bounce rate will spike by 123%.
Let’s see it in another way. The chance that visitors will leave your website and go to one that loads more quickly increases if there is a delay in your website’s loading time.
Think of your website as a storefront. Customers may choose to visit another store with a quicker entry if it takes too long for them to walk through the door at your shop.
Similarly, visitors may get impatient and leave if your website loads slowly, decreasing user engagement and conversion rates.
The user experience of your website is greatly impacted by its speed. Your website serves as a representation of you and your company; thus, the slower it loads, the more likely it is that visitors will turn to one of your competitors.
Page speed is vital for a website as it has a major impact on SEO and is a key factor in the ranking of a web page. Improved rankings will affect how customers see your brand.
It will show that your page is quick and that more visitors are visiting it. It is, therefore, important that you optimise the page speed by figuring out how exactly your site speed is doing by measuring it.
How Can I Measure The Speed Of My Web Page?
Just like any running thing needs regular maintenance and improvements to run smoothly and efficiently, your website needs regular updates and optimisation to maintain its speed and user experience. To do this, you need to measure the speed of your page.
You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, which is simple to use and allows you to check and measure how quickly your website loads on desktop devices as well as mobile ones.
The Google-provided tool enables business owners to ensure that they are meeting the quality standards necessary for top search result rankings.
To use the tool, perform the following steps:
Step 1: Enter the URL of your web page on the search bar.
Step 2: Hit the Analyse button to have the tool score your website out of 100. You will also see a list of guidelines for improving the speed of your web page.
The score for your desktop and mobile device web page will be shown separately with a separate list of suggestions.
You can also use other tools, such as GTmetrix or the Pingdom Website Speed Test, which can be used by beginners and provides results and suggestions for improving and optimizing your website’s web page.
What Has Speed Got To Do With Your WordPress Site?
Think of a slow website as the death of half of your business. Nothing bugs a user than a website that might have piqued their interest, but refused to load in a jiffy.
Do not take my word for it, but extensive studies have been conducted on this and have proven that human beings cannot hold their attention for more than 5 to 7 seconds.
This article that I am writing shall not hold your attention for a longer time if I do not cut to the chase and start talking about how you could optimise your WordPress site speed and do some serious business out there.
Similarly, your website too, needs a speed boost to be able to tweak the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and get your hands on some good revenue. Here are some ways in which you could go about the process.
You can have amazing links, perfect on-page SEO, and a ton of website traffic but if your website takes forever to load it will be like sending most of your visitors marching directly off a cliff.
Tips To Improve Page Speed
Now that you have a better understanding of what page speed is and why it matters, it’s time to learn how to improve it.
You can perform site speed optimisation on your own without even hiring a website speed optimisation service. You just have to follow a few instructions and your site will be good to go. Here are some pointers you can use to enhance the functionality and speed of your website:
Choose A High-Quality Hosting Service
The hosting provider you select will play an important role in improving your website’s performance. When you go for cheap and not so good hosting you could be a mistaking a mistake.
Cheap hosting often leads to mediocre performance. This is because you end up sharing resources with multiple websites on an overloaded server. This puts a strain on the loading time.
Opting for hosting solutions like Kinsta can offer a formidable platform meticulously built for speed. This platform steer clear of shared hosting, ensuring your resources remain untapped by other websites.
Optimise Your Images By Compressing Them
Images are frequently the largest files on a webpage and might prolong the time it takes for a page to load. Compressing images is one method of optimising them.
Without sacrificing quality, you can minimise the size of your photographs using several tools that are available online. Simply resize the image by setting a fixed height and width and finally deliver the images through a CDN.
Additionally, implement lazy loading to defer offscreen images, loading them only as they approach the viewport, which further optimises images more.
You can go do a simple Google search for to look through multiple websites to find the best image compressing tool online.
Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of servers that are distributed across the world that can help your site load faster. This is often achieved by hosting and distributing duplicates of the static information on your website from servers positioned all over the world.
The CDN serves material from the server that is nearest to the user when they visit your website, drastically reducing page load times and enhancing web page performance.
Using a high quality service will also help fix Core Web Vitals issue, which is a metrics that website owners use to calculate the page’s performance and UX. You have to run your website through an assessment that will make your website the best fit for the visitors.
The assessment shows a speed score known as Core Web Vitals score. Passing in this assessment will make sure your website page load speed is improved. This will prevent the users from moving away from your website and encourage them to stay for longer.
Allow Caching Of The Browser
Brower caching is a type of practice that you can employ to improve the performance of your web page. It enables the browser to remember the various components on a web page, including stylesheets, scripts, images, videos, and more.
By enabling browser caching, you can tell the browser to store these resources locally so that they don’t need to be downloaded again the next time the user visits your web page. For repeat users, this can drastically reduce the time it takes for pages to load.
Decrease The Amount Of Redirects
If your website is having performance issues, there may be too many redirects on your web pages. Having a lot of redirects on your website can significantly impact loading times.
Every redirection on the page leads to more time it takes for HTTP requests and responses. While some redirects may be necessary, there are some unnecessary ones too that can markedly harm page loading speeds.
To reduce redirects, carefully create internal links and menus. Also, make sure your Top-Level Domain (TLD) resolves with a maximum of one redirection.
You can take advantage of tools like Screaming Frog. By uploading you site’s .htaccess file, you can get a detailed view of redirects so you know which ones are okay to be present and which ones need to be removed.
Implement Asynchronous Loading For JavaScript
If you are using JavaScript, implementing asynchronous loading is a must. Asynchronous loading for JavaScript refers to the process of loading JavaScript files on a web page without blocking the rendering of the page.
Because it is a multi-tasker, the JavaScript files can be loaded in the background while the browser is still rendering the page.
This can greatly reduce the page loading time, especially on slower internet connections or computing devices resulting the visitors to stay on your website.
Those who are using WordPress can optimise CSS and JavaScript files with a combination of different WordPress plugin.
You can use Async JavaScript to streamline this process effectively. Additionally, you can also use WP Rocket, that have powerful features for file optimisation like removing unused CSS, load JavaScript deferred, and delaying JavaScript execution.
The plugins will easily handle the optimisation of CSS and JavaScript files on your website making your WordPress performance better.
Use A Lightweight Theme
Businesses use attractive themes to grab more people’s attention on their websites. Nonetheless, using a lightweight theme is important if you want to increase the performance of your website.
Some themes are specifically designed to load quickly and can considerably reduce the time it takes for a webpage to load. You can also use themes that are lightweight and have a more responsive web design.
Minify The Files
Your website’s overall speed can be increased by optimizing the way the files on it load. Minification is the removal of unnecessary elements like whitespace, comments, and characters.
This can substantially minimise the size of the files, which can speed up page loading and make it simpler to merge them. This produces lighter, faster-loading web pages with clearer code.
Plugins
Every plugin is different, and having too many of it can make your website very slow. There even may be some old plugins that can negatively affect the performance and speed of your website.
Therefore, do a site optimisation to make sure your website performs faster and safer, remove unnecessary plugins by turning off and deleting unused ones.
Decide if you really need all the installed plugins. You should also get rid of any of those options that do similar things. You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights to see if each plugin slows down your site.
Go through the result list and choose plugins that make your site faster for your users.
In A Nutshell
There are enough ways to enhance your site’s load speed and improve website performance and thus, rank higher in the Search Engines Results Page (SERP). Although, you could hire SEO services help to do the work for you, however, that’ll charge you a lot of money. By following the pointers above, you could easily do all of that by yourself.
While it might seem like professionals have a better know-how in dealing with these technical nitty-gritty, more often than not, they perform exactly what the article entails.
I hope the article was enlightening and I hope that you have a great time optimising your site the next time you embark on such a venture.
FAQ
How slow is a slow page?
If a page takes more than 4 seconds to load, the web page may be regarded as a slow page.
What is the reason for a slow WordPress website?
There are several reasons for a slow WordPress website. This includes employing outdated PHP or slow-loading plugins, not using compression and caching, operating too many scripts in the background, and employing plugins that are unoptimised.
What is Page Speed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights is a tool developed by Google that analyses the performance and speed of a website by providing a score and recommendations for improving the website’s performance.
