
Hey,
Do you know the site loading speed is actually becoming one of the key-ranking factors?
Back in 2010, Google directed that the loading speed of the content on your page would start impacting your rankings.
Over the years, Google has put more and more weight on page speed.
SEO people are also shouting it from the rooftops.
Is site speed everything for end-users?
Yes, it somehow influences SEO and end-users in many ways.
Your site’s speed matters for 2 reasons: your user’s experience and SEO.
But page loading time doesn’t only affect where you position in the search engines. But also your conversion rate once visitors get on your website.
On mobile, site speed is even more of an issue.
A recent study by Akamai revealed that a mere 2-second of delay in page speed load could lead to increasing your bounce rate by over 100%.
Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads…Moz
That means for every 2 seconds of delay, the number of people instantly going off your website could double.
Just imagine how many potential visitors you could possibly lose!
To make matters worse, troubleshooting slow loading times is incredibly complicated.
Explore these 10 lesser known tricks to make your website blazing fast.
Improve Your Hosting Plan
That’s the first reason.
Often when you embark on the journey, you go to the cheap way and sign up for shared hosting.
Think about it for a minute.
As the site grows in content and usage, it gets slow. So, it’s literally good to upgrade your hosting plan i.e. move to a VPS or dedicated option.
With this, you don’t have to share RAM, bandwidth, CPU, etc. with anyone else. You get dedicated resources.
Cut Short Images
The size of your website and the images in particular adversely affect the site speed.
Cut short the number of images.
The larger the content, the slower the site.
Do it by reducing the file size of images; changing the resolution of the image or making it to the standard web resolution size i.e. 72 DPI.
61% of a website’s page weight is images… According to HTTP Archive.
One more simple way is to compress or crop the image.
Or else, you can use a free plugin called WP-Smushit on WordPress. This plugin removes hidden information on pictures and prevents useless data.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Compressing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript can help you give boost to the website speed.
Optimize your code by removing:
- Spaces
- Commas
- Other useless characters
Then get into the fun stuff like fixing render-blocking scripts. This will dramatically increase your page speed. Google suggests using CSSNano and UglifyJS.
Allow Compression
Use Gzip – a software application – good for file compression. Use it to reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes.
Avoid using Gzip on image files. Instead, use a program like Photoshop to compress them. Photoshop lets you retain control over the quality of the image.
Reduce Redirects
Try reducing redirects as it makes your page load slower.
Every time a web page redirects to another page, visitors encounter extra time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete.
For instance, say your mobile redirect pattern is like this:
“example.com -> www.example.com -> m.example.com -> m.example.com/home,”
Each of these two additional redirects reduces page speed.
Browser Caching
Do you know when a visitor opens a link, browser caches a lot of information, such as JavaScript files, images, stylesheets, etc.?
The browser does this because when the same visitor returns to your site, it (browser) doesn’t have to reload the entire page.
To see whether you already have an expiration date set for your cache, use a tool like YSlow. One done, set your “expires” header to ensure how long you would like that information to be cached. In several cases, one year is a reasonable time period unless the design of your site changes frequently.
Minimize Number of Plugins
Have you ever doubted whether you could use more Plugins and Widgets for your niche?
It’s no secret that Plugins are an important component of websites. They work as complementary by making the website very rich with respect to the number of its functionalities.
But, you need to learn on a secret that makes all the differences.
Plugins also decelerate the loading speed of the website. And, slow loading speed affects the website performance.
- Before installing any plugins, check which one will really back off the speed of the site
- Keep plugins as less as possible
The more plugins, the slower the speed. The loading speed will start declining gradually.
To be completed soon…