- 03.09.2021.
Have a slow website and wonder how you can speed it up? Follow our 10 tips and we guarantee that you will notice a difference in the loading speed of the website.
Website loading speed has become a hot topic lately. One of the reasons is that more and more users are accessing the Internet via smartphones, which very often have a slower connection and a weaker configuration than desktops. Therefore, it takes more time for your website to be downloaded, loaded and displayed on the device.
Before we reveal to you the ways you can speed up your own website we want to explain to you what speed is, why it matters and how you can measure it.
What is the speed of a website
Website speed is often associated with the time it takes to fully load it. In fact, there are many more indicators that give users a sense of how fast a website is.
When users visit your website they pay attention to the following things:
- Is something going on, did the server respond
- How long it takes for something to become visible on the screen
- When is the website usable and ready to interact
It is not enough to focus on just one metric, but it is necessary to optimize all metrics that affect the user's perception of speed.
Why website speed matters
The loading speed of a website is officially one of the factors for ranking on Google search engine. Research has shown that most users leave a website if it does not load in less than three seconds and go to the competition.
Slow websites also have a bad effect on the user experience, and thus on the conversion rate, ie the sale of your products and services.
How to measure website speed
You can test the speed of a website using a variety of free tools that you can find on the Internet.
We recommend the following tools to test website speed:
Since Google has been using mobile-first indexing for some time, analyze the results for mobile display.
Tips for optimizing website speed
1. Use images in the appropriate dimensions
Reduce the size of your images to the dimensions at which they are actually displayed. There is no need to use an image in full HD resolution (1920 pixels wide) if it only takes up 500 pixels wide on a web page. This way you can save on the amount of data and improve the loading time of the website without losing on the image quality.
2. Use modern image formats
JPEG, PNG and GIF image formats are most commonly used on websites. WebP image format has superior compression and quality characteristics compared to older formats. By converting images to modern formats like WebP, you can save up to 30 percent more space, which means it will load faster and consume less mobile data.
3. Image compression
Compressing your image reduces its quality, but you can save extra space. Try to play with compression until you find a good balance between image quality and image size. Savings on the amount of data are significant while the difference in image quality is often not noticed at all by the user.
You can compress images using the following tools:
4. Lazy Load
When a web browser loads your web page, it automatically downloads all the images on it. Often users don't even get to a particular part of the page, say the footer, to see all the images at all. Therefore, it is recommended that you mark all images that are not immediately visible on the screen so that they can be loaded later. This way, the image will be downloaded and displayed just before it becomes visible on the screen.
Images are the resources that often take up the most space so it is very important that the images on your website are well optimized.
5. Remove unused code
Remove all CSS and JavaScript code that is not used to display or behave on the website, whether it is entire files or pieces of code. In addition to reducing the amount of CSS and JavaScript code that is downloaded, you will also reduce the time it takes for a web browser to parse those files.
6. Reduce the number of requests
Each file that a web browser needs to retrieve from your server takes some time. This time largely depends on the size of the file, but sending the request to retrieve the file itself also takes time because you need to establish a connection between your web browser and the server where the web page is located. You can reduce the number of requests by combining all CSS and JavaScript files into one CSS and JavaScript file.
7. Minimize CSS and JavaScript files
Minimizing or minimizing is the process of dropping empty lines, spaces, and comments in text files such as CSS and JavaScript. This reduces the file size, without affecting the look and functionality of the website. Minify is a handy free tool that allows you to minify CSS and JavaScript files online.
8. Use as few different fonts as possible
It is not recommended to use more than two up to three different fonts on the website. Apart from the fact that the design then no longer looks nice, fonts can significantly affect the size of a website. It is usually enough to use one font for headlines and another font for website text. If you do not use your fonts carefully your website can easily have over 200-300kb of unnecessary data to download.
9. Use browser caching
When a web browser opens a web page then it has to download all the files in order to display it successfully. Cache allows you to tell the web browser how long to keep a copy of your files. The next time you visit the website, you will not need to download the same files again, but they will be downloaded from your web browser.
10. Enable HTTP compression on the server
Compressing text files reduces the amount of data downloaded when loading a web page. HTTP compression must be enabled on the server hosting the website. Usually compression is already enabled on the server, but be sure to check with your hosting provider. The most popular compression tool is Gzip, and besides it, more and more brotli is used, which gives even better results.
Conclusion
Optimizing website speed pays off anyway. You'll have better positions on Google and more organic traffic. Your visitors will have a better user experience which ultimately results in higher sales.
It is for these reasons that when creating a website, our basic SEO optimization includes most of the tips we have listed.
We hope these optimization tips help you speed up your own website. If you need help with optimization, you can always contact us.
