Page speed is a very significant factor when it comes to the performance of your site. Your web page must load quickly and seamlessly. For this, the bounce rate should be significantly less. A site that is optimized for speed enhances the user experience. It can also help to boost the rankings of your search engine.
What is page speed?
We all are acquainted with the terminology page speed, which refers to how quickly your content loads when someone visits any page on your site. Page speed is the speed that refers to the loading time of a specific page.
Some of the most critical factors that can influence the page speed are-
- How many images, videos and other types of media files are contained on the page?
- What themes and plugins are installed on your website?
- The coding and the server-side scripts of your website.
These are the elements that affect the loading speed of your page. They also affect the user interface of your website. The visitors that come to your site dislike slow-loading pages. Thus, they are more likely to click away from them.
Why is page speed critical?
Every second factor in when it comes to the page loading speed. Google research shows that when the loading time increases from one to three seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 32 per cent. If the page takes five seconds or more than five seconds to load, the likelihood of a bounce rate increases by almost 32 per cent. If your page fails to load within a few seconds, visitors will abandon your site. If your web pages are sluggish, it can hurt your ability to drive engagement and conversions to your site. Page speed is the factor that plays a pivotal role in SEO. Google is the search engine that considers various factors when ranking web pages. Speed is a ranking signal that is important for desktop and mobile searches. Page speed can influence the consumers’ perception of your brand. If your web pages take a very long time to load or anything goes wrong while it is in process, it can make you look unprofessional.
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Following are some of the quick ways to improve the loading speed-
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Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution.
The hosting provider one uses plays a major role in the website’s management and performance. It includes page speed. It would be best if one did not settle for mediocre hosting to get a lower monthly rate. Cheap hosting means poor performance. It means sharing resources between multiple websites on a wholly overloaded server. It can end up straining your page loading times. However, there are a handful of performance-focused hosting solutions you can use that provide a robust platform designed for speed. These providers do not offer shared hosting. This, in turn, means that you will never have to worry about the other website draining your pool of potential resources.
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Compress and optimize your images/pictures
You use images to enhance the appearance of your web pages. They also increase the quality of your content. The larger images can also delay your loading times. One of the easiest ways for improving the page loading speed is to compress and optimize your images. You can do this by changing the file formats, compressing images through lossless compression and several other techniques.
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Reduce your redirects
Too many redirects on your website can hurt the loading times badly. Every time any page redirects somewhere else, it prolongs the HTTP request. It is crucial to eliminate unnecessary redirects on your site, which can result in significantly lower page loading times. You should ensure your top-level domain resolves with a maximum of one redirection. Several tools are available for identifying all the redirects on your site and where they lead. This makes it easier to identify the redirects that are not serving any purpose.
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Cache your web pages properly.
Caching is the most effective way for speeding up web pages. It stores copies of the files of your site. It also minimizes the work needed for the server to generate and serve a web page to a visitor’s browser. You can cache your web pages by lowering the time to the first byte. It requires the server to use fewer resources to load a page.
Caching web content also helps improve the responsiveness of your websites. It reduces the load on the backend resources and the network congestion. Web caching is performed by retaining the cache’s HTTP responses and web resources. The next time a user tries to load the page, most of the content is stored locally, and the page will also load much more quickly.
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Enable browser caching
Browser caching is yet another form of caching you can leverage if you want to improve the page loading speed of the website. It is the technique that enables the browser to store various information. It includes style sheets, images and Javascript files. It does not have to reload the entire page every time a user visits it. There are various plugins you can make use of. These plugins employ page caching and cache pre-loading for optimizing the speed of your page. They also create lightning-fast loading time.
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Use asynchronous and defer loading for the CSS and Javascript files.
We all are no strangers to the very fact that our website is made up of CSS and Javascript files. The scripts can load either synchronously or asynchronously. The first means that the files load one at a time in the order in which they appear on your web page. With the help of this method, when the browser encounters a script, it will completely stop loading the other elements on the page until the ongoing file has been fully loaded first. The latter enables multiple files for the purpose of loading at the same time. This can speed up the performance of the page. If you set this up, it involves eliminating render-blocking resources.
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Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML
You should optimize the way your files load. It helps improve the page loading speed. You should minify your CSS, Javascript and HTML code. This means you should remove all the unnecessary spaces and other elements that are not needed. This is done for reducing the size of the file.
You should decrease the size of the file as it also makes it easier to combine them. Thus, you get a cleaner code and the web pages also load faster.