Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor for mobile and desktop searches. So, the speed of your website directly impacts your ranking on Google search results. Among other factors, you should also take care of the page speed to improve your SEO ranking. Take help from this and check the results with a search rank checker and website performance testing tools.
How Fast Your Website Should Be?
Page speed means how long a page on your website takes to load. It’s usually in milliseconds or seconds. Google hints that most users will leave a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, any page of your site should load in less than 3 seconds to keep visitors on the site so they can interact with the content.
Checking Your Website Speed
To see whether your hard work is paying off or not, you should use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool which will perform a free speed test of your website and show the possible factors that may be reducing your website page speed.
How To Speed Up Your Website?
Use The Right Web Hosting Service
Your web host plays an important part in your website page speed because your website is present on the servers of your web host. The better the performance of the servers of your web host, the better your website page speed should be.
Other than the capabilities of your web host, the page load speed of your site also depends on the hosting plan you choose.
Shared servers are the cheapest because one server runs many websites. The speed of your website will also depend on the load on other websites that are running on the same server. Shared servers are never suggested for anyone who wants their page load speed to be excellent or for websites that are competing with popular sites.
For the best page load speed, choose a dedicated server. In this case, the rented server and all of its resources will only serve your website. You can go for cloud servers if you are expecting to expand and want to accomplish it seamlessly.
Website Theme
The theme of your website affects the page load speed as well. A responsive website theme is a prerequisite for any website at this point. Moreover, the theme should be customizable so you can adjust the features of your website and other parts as you want. Themes will more bells and whistles usually slow down a website so choose cleaner and optimized themes for a better page speed.
Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching is a common method of reducing the page load speed for visitors who already have visited your site once.
With browser caching, the web browser of the visitors temporarily stores some data of the webpage they visit like images and CSS. So, when the user opens that page again, the page loads faster because some parts of the page were already saved in the web browser of the user. Look for plugins on WordPress that can enable browser caching. After making this change, check out the rank checker pricing to have a rank tracker that will help in keeping track of your website’s SEO performance.
Compress Images
Unnecessarily heavy images will slow down your website speed costing you your SEO ranking. Website speed is checked with LCP scores as well. It measures the loading time of the heaviest piece of content on a certain page. If you have large-sized images, they will lead to a low LCP score.
So, you should look to compress your images. It may reduce the quality of the images a bit, but will usually reduce the size by up to 30%. There are online tools that can resize or compress an image. You can choose the tool that suits you. If you have WordPress as your CMS, you can use a plugin to perform the same thing.
Choose The Image Format Carefully
The format of an image also impacts the size and quality of the image. You should choose formats that are lighter. Use JPEG for less size and PNG for better details and a bit larger size. Another image format for lower sizes is WebP. It’s better than even JPEG.
Lastly, GIF. Don’t use GIFs because they reduce the page load speed. It’s better to convert a GIF to a video so the user can play it if they want.
Compress Videos
Like images, videos take a long time to load as well. To reduce the size of your videos, use the appropriate video format and the right resolution. You can also use a video compression tool for reducing its size. Plus, reduce the audio quality for a smaller size.
Moreover, if your website relies on videos and most of your pages have at least one video, you should use another video hosting website like YouTube.
Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of interconnected servers in different places across the world. A website loads faster when the geographical location of the server of the requested site is closer to the user. This is the main reason for using a CDN.
So, when you employ a CDN, your website cache is present on a CDN, when a user wants to open a page from your website, the server with the location closest to the user delivers the site to the user.
For instance: Your website’s server is in New York and you use CDN for your website. If a user from Germany opens your website, the server closest to Germany, let’s say Belgium responds and send the webpage to the user. It’s also possible that the country of the user who is requesting a page may also have a server there. A user from Germany might get a page sent from the CDN server in the same country. This improves the page load speed.
Reduce HTTP Requests
HTTP requests are the web browser sending a request for loading the page (or content on the page) to the website. Keep in mind that when an HTTP request is sent and the information in the answer is sent to the browser, the user can’t view it until the request is complete. But if the file doesn’t have enough content for the user to view, another HTTP request will be sent.
If there are too many HTTP requests, the pages will load slowly and the users will be annoyed. You can use Google Chrome to check out the number of HTTP requests of a specific webpage. On average a webpage sends 70 HTTP requests. This a technical area and if you want to reduce the HTTP request of your site use a better theme and consult a web developer.
Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
Every space matter when it comes to the size of a page – even the line breaks and white spaces. Make use of online minifier tools. If you have a WordPress website, you can use various plugins to minify your website’s code.
Keep in mind that combining the JavaScript and CSS files is only good for sites that use HTTP/1. It’s unnecessary for other sites.
Conclusion
Now that you know how you can improve your page load speed, begin making changes with the right tools and check the ranking of your site by getting an SEO rank report.
