9 Ways Improve Your Site Speed

Did you know that site speed, or how fast your website loads, affect your search engine optimization (SEO)? Google has indicated that loading speed is one of the factors in how it ranks websites. Site speed is an average of how long your individual webpages take to load, which is known as page speed.

Page speed can be measured in many different ways. There is the time it takes for a page to start the loading process (time to first byte), how long it takes until a user can interact with your page (first meaningful paint), and how long it takes for everything on your webpage to load (fully loaded page). You can check your current page speeds using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

There are many different methods to use that can help reduce the time it takes for your website to load, improving your overall site speed. Here’s 9 different ways that we found to improve your page speeds.

1. Optimize your images.
Images are usually what take the longest to load on a web page. If an image is unnecessary or you have too many on a page, consider removing a few. For images that are crucial to your page, try compressing them. High-quality images are important, but images that are too large in file size only take up space and increase your loading time. To improve your page speed, consider slightly reducing the sizes of your images.

2. Remove unnecessary moving objects from your website.
Along with optimizing your images, one of the easiest strategies to implement is to remove unnecessary moving objects from each page on your site. Anything that moves or requires additional plugins will slow down your site speed. Consider removing:

  • Automatic sliders
  • Auto-playing videos
  • Flashing graphics
  • Animation
  • Transition effects
  • Moving or changing banners

 

3. Use a responsive web design.
Users access the internet from all different devices. What works well for a desktop computer may not work as well on a Chromebook, mobile device, or tablet. A responsive web layout makes it so that your website will work seamlessly on any screen size. They load faster because they are mobile-friendly and the content on your website adjusts automatically

4. Use Google AMPs.
More than half of all web traffic is through a mobile device. Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is a project by Google that helps its users access mobile pages faster by using simplified HTML and caches. Since Google uses a mobile-first index, it is crucial that your website is fully functional, loads fast, and is easy to use on a mobile device. To get started, contact us here.

5. Optimize and minify your code.
Remove extra spaces, characters, unused code, comments, and more from your HTML, JavScript, CSS or whatever programming language you use. You might be surprised at the dramatic changes you may see.

6. Test your site speed regularly.
Whenever you add new pages, images, content, and more, you should always test your page speed for updated webpages. You can use tools like GTmetrix , Pingdom, and Google PageSpeed Insights.

7. Use a caching system.
You’ll have to ask your website hosting provider to do this or use a CMS plugin, but website caching can increase your site speed dramatically. The caching process, simplified, works like this: someone visits a page on your website for the first time, their web browser saves your page’s information as an HTML file, and each time that visitor goes to your page again it will have been “pre-loaded,” resulting in a much faster loading speed.

8. Reduce redirects.
Every redirect has the potential to slow down your page speed and site speed because of the additional time your visitor must wait to arrive at the destination page. Try to reduce the number of redirects that you use, and fix broken links directly when you can!

9. Use better hosting services.
Even if you employ all of the strategies listed above, it can only do so much if you’re hosting your website on a cheap, slow server that’s shared with millions of other websites. For premium hosting without breaking the bank and dedicated servers for large websites and applications, host your servers on the cloud!

For any assistance or more SEO tips, call us today at 515-232-2024 or send us a message here .