How to Improve Your Website Speed ?
How to Improve your website speed In today’s digital world ? tips & techniques is here – It doesn’t matter if your site is the most attractive and authentic, but if it takes a long time to load. Then it leaves an impact on your users. There are several reasons why your website is loading very slowly. But whatever the reasons are. You should concentrate on improving your website’s speed.
Website speed is one of the most crucial factors. It can impact both the search engine rankings and the user’s experience. A slow-loading website can increase bounce rates, decrease your SEO performance, and drive away your best customers. In this blog, we will talk about the crucial steps that can improve your website’s speed.
Which of the following techniques helps improve the website loading speed for better SEO?
Several factors can impact the website’s page load speed. However, there are several ways to improve your website’s speed and performance. you can also improve your website speed with best digital marketing agency in dubai. These are as follows-
1. Optimise the size of your images:
The biggest reason for a website’s speed being slow speed is the website’s large and unoptimized images. Having high-quality images shows the quality and authenticity of your website. But sometimes these high-quality websites can also affect the loading speed of your website.
Various websites use graphics heavily. If you use resolution a lot, or if your image is not compressed. Then it can slow down your website’s speed.
To optimise the size of your images, you have to follow these points-
(i) Select the accurate format: PNG is best for transparent graphics, while JPEG is best for photos. Newer formats like WebP can provide the best compression and quality without requiring bandwidth.
(ii) Compress and resize: You have to use these tools to reduce the size of your images without compromising the quality. You should use tools like Image Optim. You also have to ensure that the images you have created are of the correct size according to the space occupied by them.
(iii) Slow loading: You should use slow loading, so that it ensures that the other media files and the images load only when the user scrolls down your media pages. This can effectively decrease the loading time of your website and works to improve the user’s overall experience.
For those business that wants to expand their business in the UAE, especially for those businesses that concentrate on local SEO. Image optimisation is essential for them.
2. Decrease the usage of the external scripts:
Any scripted webpage element that is loaded from elsewhere, such as CTA buttons, external commenting systems, lead generation pop-ups, CMS plugins, etc, must be loaded every time the page is loaded.
Depending on the size of the script, you may be able to slow down the page or cause the page to not load all at once. This is called layout shifting. This can usually be frustrating, especially for mobile users who must scroll to see the full page.
3. Remove the unnecessary pop-ups:
Pop-ups are commonly used to showcase special offers or to tell people what to take the next step in the customer journey, whether it’s to draw the attention of a first-time visitor to your website or to enter your email address. These pop-ups serve as a means to enhance communication between the customer and the website in the future.
E-commerce is also a part of the pop-up. Excessively bright graphics can have a negative impact on website performance and speed. These pop-ups can also interfere with a user’s ability to engage with content on a website that has already been optimised for conversions.
To stop delays in site speed, set parameters for using pop-ups as well. For example, you can also use pop-up triggers so that additional code can stop your website from loading at a slow speed. Show it as the page loads. For example, Time delay pop-up and exit intent. Both the trigger’s time delay pop-up and exit intent give some time space between starting pop-up load and page load.
4. Reduce broken and redirect links:
Too many redirects and broken links can negatively impact your website’s performance and slow down its loading time. The HTTP response and request procedure takes a considerable amount of time. And because of this, your SEO ranking can go down.
One advantage of reducing redirects is that these additional loading steps are removed, and the speed of the page also improves and is better than before.
Redirects are a tab that appears when a user clicks on a specific URL. But it is automatically redirected to some other URL.
Redirects are used to improve both user experience and SEO.
By redirecting web traffic from an outdated page to a more relevant page, search performance also remains intact. This can avoid broken links and errors.
5. Decrease the number of HTTP requests:
HTTP requests are tabs when a web browser sends a request to a website’s server to get more information.
Every file which loaded on your website, whether it is a script, icon or image known as a separate HTTP request.
When someone visits a user’s page, the server receives a request from the browser. These HTTP requests process files containing images and text. And until the request is completed, the user cannot even view the file.
Every element on your webpage, whether it’s a JavaScript or CSS file, requires an HTTP request to load. The more things you have on your page, the more HTTP requests you need. However, due to these HTTP requests, the speed of your website can also be slowed down.
To improve the website’s speed, you should concentrate on decreasing the total number of HTTP requests. This can be possible when you optimise the images and remove the unused plugins.
To reduce HTTP requests, you can adopt the following steps-
(i) Combine files: To load any page, first of all, you have to reduce HTTP requests. For this, you have to combine JavaScript and CSS files. If you want to combine your images into one file, you can use CSS for this.
(ii) Reduce the elements: Keep the page design of your website authentic, but simple and attractive. Keep in mind that you have to include only those elements that can improve your workability or are necessary for it.
(iii) Check other parts of your page that are contributing to page loading time: Compressing and cutting images can be the best option to reduce page loading time and reduce HTTP requests. But it is also worth paying attention to what you see on the network panel, that HTTP requests are increasing. You can understand this as an example, like a video taking one or two seconds to load. From this, you can decide whether that video is worth watching or not.
As the number of HTTP requests decreases, you will also notice an improvement in the speed of your website. Because these HTTP requests directly affect both SEO ranking and user experience.
6. Select the right hosting service strategy:
If you are using a shared web hosting provider, then the possibility is high that its overall performance will be lower than the average. You should think about upgrading your hosting service plan. If you are using the word press, then you should think about using a managed service which is known for its high-performance hosting.
There are mainly three options for hosting. But there is also a bonus option for hosting. These are as follows-
(i) Shared hosting: Shared hosting is a type of hosting that allows multiple websites to share resources on a single server, such as CPU, storage space, and RAM. In simple words, shared hosting decreases the cost and optimises the server resources. That’s why shared hosting is the best option for small businesses and startups that have recently begun their online journey.
(ii) Virtual private server (VPS) hosting: A Virtual private server is a server in which a physical server is shared. Virtual private server (VPS) hosting is the mediator option between dedicated and shared hosting solutions. A virtual private server creates a separate virtual space for users.
But a virtual private server works like many different servers. Each virtual server gets a separate set of resources. So you can make sure that the hosted websites do not compete with each other for these resources. A virtual private server is a hosting style that falls between having your dedicated machine and using a shared one.
(iii) Dedicated server hosting: Dedicated hosting is a service where the user rents the entire server space. You can also configure these machines according to your preference. Out of these three options— shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server —the most expensive is dedicated server hosting. In a dedicated server, you have control of the entire server, so you have complete control over the server settings. Due to having full control over the server settings, many companies allow you to take advantage of it.
Dedicated servers provide you with top-level security, model control and performance. On this website, owners are not allowed to share any resources of the server with other clients. If you have dedicated resources available, this allows web owners to optimise every aspect of the server. This process includes options for software installation, operating system, and hardware configuration. This flexibility helps you make sure that the specific requirements of each client are met.
7. Minify the CSS, HTML files and JavaScript:
Shorten the CSS, JavaScript and HTML. If you improve your file loading speed, then it can improve your page loading speed. In this way, you can increase the JavaScript, HTML code and CSS. With this, you can reduce the size of the file. You can also remove unnecessary comments and spaces. This can improve the loading speed of the website.
When you reduce the size of the files, it becomes even easier to organise them. As a result, the website starts loading faster, and the code also becomes cleaner. Organising every line of code is not enough.
There is a fixed limit on parallel network requests in the browser, so if your website requires a minimum of 4 requests to load, it will be faster than loading 40 different resources. A developer used many files to develop a website.
Minimisation is the process by which the size of CSS files and JavaScript is optimised by reducing the size of symbols or removing symbols. The output is functionally the same, but it is not completely human-readable. But browsers will have no problem reading it, and it will load even smaller-sized files faster.
8. Use browser caching:
Browser caching means that some resources of your site, such as JavaScript files, images and CSS files, are stored in the user’s browser. This way, their browser does not need to get your site files from the server every time it visits your website, which makes the loading process even faster.
Browser cache is a permanent storage place where copies of the browser’s temporary files are saved so that the web pages that are currently viewed can also load faster. Browser caching can be set up when expiration and cache control headers are set on the web server, and when the length of time files will be stored in the user’s browser is specified.
Browser caching instructions are given in the header of the HTTP response from the hosting server. This greatly reduces the amount of data transferred to the browser by the server, which significantly reduces loading time for users.
9. Remove the unnecessary plugins:
Not all plugins are needed to be the same. All plugins made are different. If there are too many plugins on your website, it will slow down your website a lot. Even old plugins that are not kept properly can prove to be dangerous to your safety. This will cause compatibility-related issues, which can also have a negative impact on your performance.
Therefore, in such a situation, it is important for you to reduce the number of plugins on your website. The best way to reduce the number of plugins is to remove or disable those plugins which you are not using right now. It is always advised that you check all the plugins you are installing so that you can find out whether these plugins are necessary for you or not.
Here, we are going to discuss some such methods which work to increase the speed of the website. When you use CDN and cache pages, you just have to start installing plugins. This will make your image loading and script even better and will also reduce the site files to a minimum.
One thing you must always remember is that the more time your website takes to load, the more likely it is that the visitor will leave your website and go to some other website. Therefore, you must pay more attention to the loading speed of your website so that users have a memorable and positive experience with your website.
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10. Optimise the code execution:
Organising the code on your website can also improve your browser’s loading speed and make your website load faster. For example, when you optimise database queries, search functions can also become faster as it takes less time to retrieve search results. When your users want to load the most important things, then the code also needs to be well organised to load these elements. To understand this through an example, keep the content that is shown first to the users before scrolling on an importance and priority basis. Because the content that is shown first to the users while scrolling is very important to them.
11. Execute the CDN (content delivery network):
A content delivery network (CDN) decreases the loading time of your website by distributing the content on different servers worldwide.
When all the data required to load a website fully is concentrated in one place, it affects the starting and ending loading times.
This problem becomes even worse because internet service providers will feel the increase in internet traffic worldwide.
But, CDN make the process of sending files like JavaScript, CSS, images and fonts to your viewers even more complex. Setting them up is usually quite easy. CDN process comes under the technical SEO.
Most CDNs also provide additional performance benefits such as protecting you from attacks such as DDoS and automatic image optimisation that contribute to better, faster and stable site performance.
CDN is becoming popular day by day. A research report of 2023 proved that CDN distributed 70% of global internet traffic.
CDN is considered to be one of the first recommendations to increase website speed.
12. Audit the site:
You should audit the current performance of a site before it loads and before making any changes that affect the way content is handled.
To start, you can use some tools to analyse the performance of a webpage. Among them, PageSpeed Insights is the most famous and authentic tool. It will check the web vitals on your PC and evaluate whether you have passed or not.
You will also get a colour-coded score to show the overall performance of your site. This will also help you identify better opportunities to improve your score.
Experience should also be added to your evaluation. You should access your website on multiple devices and think about how this experience feels. Is this experience fast, smooth?
The more data you collect to improve your site’s performance, the more you will be able to improve your site.
The Pagespeed Insights tool is the best. Its score is reliable and trustworthy
13. Include the CSS and JavaScript files:
CSS and JavaScript files are the largest files on any website. This is cited as the main reason for poor speed metrics in Google Lighthouse reports. This is also cited as separate HTTP requests. Hence, it is assumed that a total of 10 HTTP requests are required for five CSS and JavaScript files.
If you have good knowledge of web development, then it may be possible for you to merge a set of CSS and JavaScript files and reduce the number of steps required to fully load your site. If someone works with developers to make necessary improvements to the site, then that can be their target.
WP Rocket is the best and useful tool to improve the performance of a WordPress website.
14. Turn to the HTTP/2:
HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is an application-level network protocol that decides how content is transferred over a network. HTTP 2 is the current or latest version of the protocol at this time.
HTTP is the protocol that the browser uses to communicate with a remote web server. HTML is used to transfer JavaScript, CSS, images, stylesheets and other files and resources.
The solution to this problem is to reduce HTTP requests.
You can switch your website to HTTP/2. Your hosting provider will provide you with details on how to do this.
There are a lot of advantages of HTTP/ 2 in SEO. This will keep your page loading speed time always fast if fewer resources are needed to render your website.
HTTP/2 can improve your SEO experience by improving the security and speed of your site. HTTP/2 can optimise the use of browser resources and your server, thereby avoiding problems like obstruction and disruption. This can improve your site’s availability, reliability and user satisfaction.
One of the advantages is the ability to send multiple files at the same time on the same connection. This can help avoid many delays.
15. Check your DNS speed:
The longer your domain name server takes to respond, the higher your time to first byte (TTFB) and the slower your site will load.
With free online tools, you can know where the DNS providers are ranked in comparison to other providers. This helps you identify specific performance concerns.
DNS checker.org is the best tool for checking the DNS provider ranking.
In some cases, your hosting provider will also provide you with DNS services.
Conclusion
In today’s digital and competitive era, web developers need to adapt and evaluate the speed of the website. Increasing site speed not only improves search rankings but also improves user experience. Doing so ensures that an organisation does not miss out on golden opportunities like conversions, best customers, revenue, and lead generation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is the website speed?
Website speed means how fast a website loads after a user visits your website and how fast your content displays to the user. If your website is slow, then problems like low traffic, poor search engine rankings and poor or negative user experience can arise.
Website speed measures how quickly a browser loads webpages completely from a given website. Websites that load slowly may drive users away from your website. If your website loads slowly, it can disappoint the user, and it is possible that the user may not like to visit your website next time. Websites that load fast get more traffic and conversion rates also increase, so it is important to improve website speed.
Q2. How to improve the website’s loading speed?
To improve the website’s loading speed, you should consider the following points-
(i) Move the HTTP/2
(ii) Remove the unnecessary plugins
(iii) Use browser caching
(iv) Decrease the number of HTTP requests
(v) Execute the CDN (Content Delivery Network)
(vi) Reduce the unnecessary pop-ups
Q3. Why does website speed matter most?
A website with a faster loading speed attracts more user attention and gives users a better experience. Your website’s speed also affects your SEO performance, user connections, and conversion rates.
As soon as a user visits a website and the website loads immediately, it increases user satisfaction, and when user satisfaction increases, then the reputation of your business also increases. When the popularity of your business increases, it helps to achieve new heights to your business.
Q4. Which factors affect the speed of a website?
Timely response, CDN (content delivery network), total number of HTTP requests, usage of the redirects, file size, quality of code, quality of web hosting and browser caching are the factors that can affect the speed of a website.
