17 Strategies for Optimizing Your Website Speed in 2022
Need to catch more impressions, create more engagement, and convert more visitors into customers? Start by improving website speed.
It’s a presence of mind approach supported by solid data: a one-second delay in site load times reduces user satisfaction by 15% or more, and 79% of paying customers will consider shopping elsewhere in the event that your website’s product and checkout pages can’t keep pace.
Assessing your website speed is sufficiently easy — Google offers a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that provides a color-coded green/yellow/red score reflecting your site’s overall performance — but what happens if your results aren’t good?
If you don’t know how to enhance website speed — the following are 17 procedures to supercharge webpage loading times and increase end-user satisfaction.
1. Audit Your Site
Prior to rolling out any improvements that influence how your site loads and handles content, it merits auditing current performance. This begins with tools like the PageSpeed Insights option referenced above but should also include actual experience:
Access your website from different devices and see what the experience feels like. Is it consistent and rapid, or unwieldy and awkward? The more data you have about how your site performs, the better your capacity to distinguish and execute key fixes.
2. Prioritize Potential Fixes
Whenever you’ve recognized website speed issues, it’s enticing to fix everything. Don’t.
Instead, focus on potential fixes in light of what makes the biggest difference to your visitors. For instance, if your site requires some time to begin loading, center your endeavors around server-side worries, for example, hosting provider issues or DNS issues. Here’s the reason: Even assuming the content on your site likewise battles to convey at speed, it won’t matter if loading the page itself takes so long that visitors give up and head off to someplace else.
3. Evaluate Your Current Hosting Provider
As stated above, your hosting provider could be a potential source of speed issues. While a few elements could add to speed issues, including the geological area of your provider, their actual infrastructure, and the general bandwidth of their network connection, the kind of web hosting — shared, VPS or dedicated server — your website is utilizing can likewise influence performance.
Though shared hosting options are the most cost-effective, they see hosting resources split among different sites, bringing down overall performance. Virtual private server (VPS) options logically segment services on a shared physical drive to further improve performance yet face speed issues if resource loads are high. Dedicated servers are more costly than shared or VPS options yet will essentially boost your speed.
4. Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
When all data required to fully load your site is stored in one place, initial and ongoing load times suffer. Content delivery networks (CDNs) use multiple servers to store your content across multiple locations — when users visit your site, the CDN chooses the server (or servers) closest to their physical location to optimize content delivery. Worth noting? Not all CDNs are created equal, so it’s worth evaluating several providers to find your best fit.
5. Optimize Your Images
Images boost the impact of your site but can drag down loading times, especially if they’re high resolution. Compressing these images before adding them to your site can save precious time — many photo-editing programs now include “save for web” options that optimize images for websites but there are also free, online options available for compressing common files types such as .JPG, .PNG and .TIFF.
6. Reduce Total Redirects
Redirects send users from the page they’ve clicked on to another page — mainly, they’re an incredible method for connecting high-ranking, high-traffic pages to fresher content you’ve created. The issue? More redirects mean more loading time, which can adversely influence the user experience.
While it’s worth utilizing a redirect at first to keep content perspectives steady, replace old redirects with new content ASAP to keep load times short.
7. Limit HTTP Requests
Every HTTP request — for images, stylesheets, scripts, and fonts — adds to your site’s overall load time. As your site grows, these HTTP requests start to stack up and eventually create a noticeable delay between user click-throughs and actual page loading.
In-browser services such as Google’s Developer Tools can identify all the HTTP requests made by your site and help you pinpoint old or overly-complex requests that can be eliminated or combined with other functions to save time.
8. Compress, Keep Compressing
The more you can reduce file sizes without compromising quality, the better your website performance. One of the most robust and dependable compression frameworks is gzip, however different techniques can likewise convey reduced file sizes without affecting the user experience. Smartest option? Ask your web hosting service what sort of compression they’re utilizing. If they’re not utilizing any, think about a new provider.
9. Capitalize on Caching
Caching permits browsers to pre-load a portion of your content to speed up page delivery. Many content management frameworks (CMS) will consequently cache the latest versions of your site, but on the other hand it’s feasible to expand this caching timeframe through CMS settings — this is particularly useful for content that doesn’t routinely change on your site.
10. Track 404 Errors
404 or “page not found” errors occur when users try to access a page that you’ve deleted or moved — and once they’ve run into 404 errors it’s unlikely they’ll try accessing your site again, meaning you lose a potential customer. Solve for 404 errors by running free, external tools to track down 404 outcomes and remove dead links.
11. Make Mobile a Priority
As more users switch to mobile devices as their main browsing and shopping means, speedy mobile sites are essential. While it’s possible to simply display your desktop site on mobile devices and hope for the best, this often results in load time and interactivity issues that easily frustrate users. Here, it’s important to spend on the development of a mobile-native website designed to maximize loading speed and improve response time.
12. Streamline Your CMS
The right content management system can significantly improve website performance by streamlining content retrieval and offering robust options to modify site operations. Both free and for-pay options exist; do some digital legwork to find out which CMS works best for your site.
13. Combine Key Files
If you have the website development know-how, it’s possible to combine sets of JavaScript or CSS files and reduce the number of steps required to completely load your site. WordPress plugins such as WP Rocket make this possible with just a few clicks, but whether you dive into code itself or use a CMS, it’s worth considering file combinations to increase total speed.
14. Determine Your DNS Speed
The longer it takes your domain name server (DNS) to respond, the longer your time to first byte (TTFB) and the slower your site loads. Free online tools can determine where your DNS provider ranks compared to other offerings, which in turn helps pinpoint specific performance issues. Worth noting? In some cases, your hosting provider will also supply DNS services, while in others these two functions are separate.
15. Opt for Asynchronous Loading
Many files and functions on your website are loaded simultaneously by default, and that implies they’re loaded according to the pattern in which they show up on the page — elements will only load once the script or service immediately prior is fully loaded, increasing page load times.
Numerous new CMS tools and plugins, however, make it possible to enable asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript elements which allows them to load simultaneously.
16. Choose Fewer Fonts
While web fonts can help your site stand out from the crowd, they can also negatively impact performance, especially if they’re uncommon or require unique character sets. To maximize page loading speed, use the fewest number of fonts possible, and focus on fonts that are optimized for new browsers.
17. Pinpoint Problematic Plugins
To wrap things up? Pinpoint performance-draining plugins. While plugins offer a host of valuable features to assist with dealing with your website they can likewise negatively impact performance, particularly if they’re utilized to stack a lot of resources or perform huge data set queries. Here, the speed rule is basic: Only keep the plugins you want and consistently use the latest, fastest versions.
The faster, the better.
The quicker your website loads, show content, and responds to client input, the lower your bounce rates, and the higher your conversions. Here, steady improvement is basic — while going from delayed to supercharged doesn’t come about coincidentally, any of our 17 website optimization systems can assist with kicking off your requirement for speed.
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