How to Speed up Your Website – A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization

The contemporary world belongs to tech-savvy and restless people; the people who would not bother to close a webpage before it loads. They would certainly won’t wait for a website that doesn’t show up in less than a few seconds. You would not want YOUR audience to do the same, right? Then get ready to tweak your website’s performance if you think it may lead your visitors to back off. Here is the homework that you would do before moving to the actual implementation – a comprehensive guide to website speed optimization.

Let’s start with the fundamentals.

What does Website Speed mean?

Website speed depicts how quickly your site loads when a user clicks it. Users can manually enter a URL or click on a link that takes them to your website. The time that your site takes to open up with its complete content determines the speed of the website. If the website speed is slow, you would definitely lose your audience.

In such cases, a website speed optimization service is the best option available. You must contact the right one as soon as possible.

What is the best website loading time?

When you calculate the average website speed for industries and countries across the world, you will find it to be 8.66%. Have a look at the results.

But do you think it is preferable?

Well, it’s certainly not. Your website should load in 3 seconds or less. People stay away from slow loading websites that take a long time to display their content properly. Therefore, if you don’t want your Google rankings to decline, optimize your site for the best loading experience.

But, why does website speed even matter? 

You can make a list of the drawbacks of a slow-loading website. Website speed decides its future existence. It can either take it to the next level or pull it down to nothing. It has a direct impact on:

• lead conversions
• website traffic
• sales
• page views
• brand reputation

According to statistics, 47% of people leave a website if its loading time is more than 3 seconds. Therefore, if you aim to stand out from the crowd, you must improve your website’s speed. Even if you have a WordPress website, WordPress page speed plays a vital role in its overall performance.

Another essential role that website speed plays is in SEO. There is no doubt in the significance of Google rankings for your site. Since Google prefers fast loading websites, you cannot afford to lag in terms of speed. User experience is something that Google treats as a base for determining useful websites. Website speed would directly impact the UX. Therefore, don’t underestimate slow website speed.

How would you know your Website is slow – Website Speed Tests

The simplest way to check if your website loads fast or not is to enter the URL in the browser and record its loading time. You may not find it extremely useful, but you will get a rough idea for sure.

Other than this, you can take a website speed test to get proof of your findings.

The test uses particular servers for different countries to gauge the loading time of a website. Collect the information and pass it to page speed optimization services, which work to boost the speed of webpages.

Best Website Speed Testing tools 

• GTMetrix – With GTMetrix, you just have to enter the URL of your website, and you will get the results in one go. You will get a detailed report of features that directly influence your site speed.
• Pingdom – It is a paid tool that monitors the page speed and provides website speed optimization scores. Using this tool, you can track the bottlenecks that are decreasing your website speed.
• Google’s PageSpeed Insights – If you want to spot the problems directly, you may visit Google PageSpeed Insights. Google will give a comprehensive explanation of what is right and what you can improve.
• YSlow – It works the best on Yahoo and would give you real-time data on your website’s performance. It is a complete package of statistics and improvement tips. To use this tool, you need to download a browser extension.

Think about where all these utilities take you? Of course, towards the rational thought of optimizing your website for speed. Either you use a speed optimizationpluginor hire professionals; you must look into it.

What is Website Speed Optimization?

You can define website speed optimization as the process of improving the speed of your site by tweaking the components that affect it. The method involves auditing the existing website and spotting the problematic areas and working on them.

How Is Site Speed Optimization So

Important for User Experience?

Website speed directly influences the user experience of your site. Right from building a website to gathering traffic and converting leads, your site requires a robust UX. Let’s see how website speed impacts UX.

Usability

A serviceable website must be easy to use and navigate. But how would a user go through the elements of a site if they fail to load when they open it. Components like background images and other visuals might load slowly. It affects the visitors’ stay on the website. Without even looking for other pages of your site, they would leave, thereby increasing the bounce rates. Just think if you optimize those elements to load faster, how the audience would react.

SEO

You have already seen how valuable Google considers website speed for rankings. Even for mobile devices, Google looks for fast loading web pages. Low rankings on Google means less traffic. Therefore, if you miss out on page speed, you will lose traffic and, in turn, conversions and sales.

User Engagement 

When users find a website responding quickly to their actions, they remain engaged with the site. But if they wait for pages loading for a long time, they would back off. Most importantly, call-to-actions (CTAs) need to be active and quickly respond to user requests. How would you ask the user to engage with your website if your CTAs are not responsive?

Conversions

When you succeed to embed perfection in all the factors mentioned above, you will undoubtedly give rise to the conversion rates. If your website manages to be useful, high ranking, and engaging, your leads will definitely convert into happy customers. Therefore, you cannot overlook website speed in terms of conversion rates.

Guidelines to speed up your website

Before moving to the techniques of website speed optimization, let’s see the essential principles of speeding up a website.

Fewer HTTP requests

Whenever a user enters a URL in the browser, it sends an HTTP request to the server for opening the desired page. Every element on your page will have an HTTP request, which increases the loading time of a website. Try to reduce the number of these requests.

Faster TTFB

Optimal websites have less than 200ms of TTFB (Time to First Byte). That is, TTFB is the time that a server takes to transmit the first byte of data to the browser. Identify the reasons for higher response time and hence improve the TTFB.

Caching

A cache stores the elements of a web page temporarily when a user first opens it. For the next time, when the user visits the same website, the cache opens up these elements faster as compared to the first time. Therefore, the cache will boost the revisits to your sites. You can use a WordPress caching plugin for the same if your website is based on WordPress.

Asynchronous Loading

Try to allow your scripts and file to load all at once. Techies call it asynchronous loading. Here all the JavaScript and CSS files load at the same time, thereby increasing the overall website speed.

Updated Hosting

Upgrade your hosting services. An expensive but effective hosting would boost your website speed. Dedicated servers suit the best for high traffic but slow loading websites.

You may need Website Speed Optimization Services if you are not able to configure everything by yourself. Have a look at how professionals deal with the problem of website speed.

Best Website Speed Optimization Techniques

Upgrade your Hosting Services

Looking for a cheaper web hosting plan may give you the delight of saving money for a while. But in the long-term, you will end up slowing their websites. If your hosting plan also comes under such a category, it’s high time that you update it and contact a new hosting service provider. Choose a company that caters to all your website needs and thereby improves your website speed. With a fast host, you won’t waste your money; instead, give a boost to your site speed.

Optimize your site for Images

Slow loading images create a wrong impression on the visitors. They would not sit idle in front of your website, waiting for images to load. The best way to overcome this problem is to reduce the size of images that you upload on your site. You cannot avoid adding visuals to your website but can definitely compress them.

If your website works on WordPress, then there are many plugins available for compression of images just after uploading them to your site. WordPress Speed Optimization Service can help you achieve it if you find it challenging to perform this task yourself.

Minimize the size of Files and combine them

There are a lot of files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which require additional HTTP requests. The process of minification involves eliminating unwanted characters from these files, like white spaces and formatting. To reduce the number of HTTP requests, you combine all such files. There is an exclusive benefit for WordPress users. WP offers the developers with a speed optimization WordPress plugin to enhance your website speed. You would find a lot of them: WP Rocket, WP Optimize, WP Fastest Cache Plugin, WP Super Cache, etc.

Mobile Optimization

Tech-savvy people are now switching to mobile devices for their searches. Even Google also gives priority to mobile-optimized sites than other ones. You have to optimize your website on the basis of two factors:

• The theme of the website and the structure of code.
• Images embedded on your site.

By improving these factors, you can tweak your website’s performance. WordPress users have the power to utilize the best out of the platform. Plugins like WordPress Caching plugin, speed optimization WordPress plugin, etc. are some of the tools available for your help.

Uninstall unused Plugins

While WordPress offers a plethora of services, it may leave a user to revisit the plugins installed. You may keep installing plugins whenever you need new functionality for your website. After using it for some time, you may find it useless. But you forget to delete them, and they keep troubling your site, hampering it to load quickly. Check out all your plugins and confirm if all of them are required on the website. Delete the unwanted ones to allow your site to breathe openly.

Broken links and redirects can be improved

Broken links and unnecessary redirects directly impact the user experience on your website. When the URL of your site suffers from discrepancies, it results in broken links. The screen comes up with a 404 error message. Too many redirects may also cause inconvenience to the users. Therefore, you must try to look after these factors as well for website speed optimization.

Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP is a useful tool that allows your website to display essential information on mobile devices. AMP pages work as alternatives to the web pages that aim to show only helpful information to the users. If you consult a WP speed Fix Service, you can make use of WordPress plugins to avoid complex code and incorporate AMP.

Are you looking for such services to enhance your website speed? If it is yes, then contact F5 Buddy, the leading website speed optimization service provider. Our work extends support to WordPress websites also. We provide WordPress page speed optimization service, in case you need our help to tweak your WP site. Specify your needs in a form and get a quote to know more about how we render our services.