Page speed is a ranking factor. In other words, if your site is not optimized to load quickly. The website wouldn’t rank high. Users abandon your website’s page due to low page speed. If it takes a too long time to load, people will go elsewhere. When your page is abandoned, Google assumes the users cannot find what they are looking for on your site. And Google will tweak things to serve better results.
Why does the site’s page speed matter to SEO?
Website speed performance will influence keyword’s ranking in search engines. To rank higher in the search engines, many website owner-report seeing an increase in their traffic after speeding up their design. If your website speed is slow, visitors will switch your website to others. The time it takes your website to load influences how successful your website will be.
Today, I would like to share various tips on how can you optimize your website and decrease your loading time. Before applying these techniques to your website, check the page speed of your website by using free tool Gtmetrix, page speed insights. By using these tools you will have the idea of your website’s file size, loading page speed.
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Below are a few tips to optimize your website
1. Hosting
You can think to optimize your website only after you surely know that it is not your host that is slowing down your website. Recently I optimized a site which is hosted on Godaddy and it is the worst hosting site that put many websites on a single server. Due to this, the server is slow. So, choose the right web hosting to make your website fast. Visit some community sites like WebHostingTalk that is filled with hosting information and read the review of that hosting website.
The optimization techniques are only succeeding when your hosting is good.
Shared hosting: Today, shared hosting is the most common type of hosting. Your website is hosted in this shared hosting along with many others. The hosting company controls the webserver, that’s why there is very little control in your hand over server setting.
Virtual hosting and Dedicated server: You have full control of your server.
2. WordPress Theme
You should choose a responsive theme that will boost your website page speed in a different layout like desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Search engines favor responsive website. The default WordPress theme is well coded, responsive, lightweight, very fast, and easy to customize.
3. Minimum Plugins
Plugins are a common component for the WordPress website with advanced features recommended by third party. If you install more plugins in your sites which results in slower website. So, the easiest way to improve the performance of your website is to minimize the number of plugins. Delete the unnecessary plugins. To check the website performance disable the plugin and then measure the performance. If any of the plugins affect your site performance then ask for support in the plugin support forum.
4. Minimize javascript and CSS files
If the website has a large number of CSS and JavaScript files, then it also leads a large number of HTTP request when users want to access the files. The user’s browsers treat these request individually and that result in website slow down. So, reducing the number of CSS and JavaScript files will improve the website speed.
5. Size of image
Images are a vital part of the website. Everyone wants to see the eye-catching image. A lot of images, photos, and infographic on your page improve your site engagement. The negative impact of the use of images is that they are usually a large file that slows down the page speed of the website. The best way to reduce the size of the image without compromising the quality of the image is to reduce the image by using different tools such as tinypng, imageoptim, and Jpegmini. Another way to reduce the size of the image to use the HTML responsive images and attributes that adjust image size and improve the website speed based on user display properties.
6. Reduce the use of web font
There are different ways to optimize the web font. At first run your website through the page speed testing tool like Gtmetrix, and Pingdom. So, you can analyze your site by waterfall chart and view the Https request. The following measures are used to reduce the size of the web fonts.
- Choose only the needed styles.
- Use modern WOFF2 formats for modern browsers
7. 404 errors
It means that the page is not found and this message is provided by the hosting to a search engine when the content is no longer exist. To detect the 404 errors, use the Google Webmaster Tool (GWT). Once you detected all the 404 errors, you have to find the traffic on that page. If there is no traffic on that page then leave that page as it is. If the page has still some traffic then redirect that page for your website to get traffic from that page.
8. Reduce redirect
The website creates additional Https request that affects the performance of the site and slow the page speed. So, avoid to do redirect or keep these redirect URLs minimum. Firstly, you should audit the website by using SEO audit tool such as Screaming Frog and find all the redirect URLs. Then check the redirect URLs and separate necessary URLs (which is redirect on purpose) and critical URLS (no any benefits).
9. CSS Sprites
CSS Sprite is used to combine the image into one big image and display them using CSS background positioning. Thus reduce the https request that the browser has to make. This will automatically improve the performance of the website.
10. Use a Content Delivery Network
A set of the webserver which is distributed across the geographical location. And the function of CDN is to deliver the content to the user with regard to their location. When you host a website on the same server, all users request are sent to the same server. And this is the reason, the time needed for each request increases. The load time increases when the user is far from the server. With the use of CDN, users request is redirected to the nearest server. The content is delivered to the user quickly and also the website work faster.
11. Create an AMP
It is a new form to speed up the performance of the site. And according to the data of 2015, it cut the load time up to 80% in the initial tests. If you have huge traffic on your website, set up an AMP that is the best solution for you.
Conclusion
The main factor of the performance of the website is its page speed. The user wants to enjoy the content by delivering it as quick as possible. So, you can enjoy the increasing quantity of users. Now, start to optimize the page speed of your site. And also which one of the above is worked the best for you. If you have tried something different that is not mentioned above. Let me know in the comment below!
