For the more excellent user experience, the loading speed of the website and efficiency is incredibly essential. When the site is too slow and sluggish, you cannot attract even a single visitor, and thus forget to expect the future audience.
Website speed is one of the utmost ranking factors and also one of the most strategic parts of SEO that is usually overlooked by people.
Today, in this rapidly evolving digital era, you should also amplify yourself. Speed is everything; the world of digital marketing is gigantic, resulting in the competition has become extremely stiff. People want a rapid response to their queries and searching.
A one-second lag in page loading time may result in:
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction,
- 11% drop in page views, and
- 7% drop in conversions.
It’s essential to make website performance a priority because poor website performance encourages poor user experiences. Hence, if still, you haven’t upgraded your website, for instance, if you haven’t implemented some essential steps that augment your site speed, then let’s look at ten ways you must implement if you want to achieve better search ranking.
- Use External JS and CSS Files
The browser caches external resources such as javascript and CSS files once the user loads a webpage. Therefore, rather than inline JavaScript and CSS files, the better it is to place them in external files.
Using inline CSS also augment the web page rendering time. Keeping everything specified in your main CSS files well-defined makes the browser to do less while rendering the website.
As a leading benefit, including external JavaScript & CSS files, allows site management smoother as you simply need to handle global files rather than code scattered around several web pages.
- Avoid Resizing Images in HTML
If the dimensions of image are already 1280x900px, however you want it to be 400x280px, then here you need to resize the image, and for this, you can take the help of Photoshop too instead of utilizing the width & height attributes in HTML.
It can lead to favorable results on your website; of course, a big picture would always be heavier in file size than just a smaller one.
- Stop Using Images to Display Text
Not only does text in a picture appears irrelevant to the audience and hence worthless for SEO, but utilizing only photos to view content often level-up the loading times on the web sites as well, as more images imply a heavier web page.
So it needs to be noted that you will have to decide if serving font files will be more efficient for you rather than providing images.
- Optimize the Way You Write Code
Look at the source code. Do you still have all the tags in your use, or should you choose the CSS to support the display? For eg, rather than using < h1><em > The heading</em></h1 >, you can only use CSS to create the letters in heading italics by using the font-style attribute.
Write code effectively that will not only reduce the size of the HTML and CSS files, but it also helps you to manage your website extremely well.
- Load JavaScript at the End of Your Document
It’s better if you’ve got the scripts ready at the page end instead of the top. It helps the user to render anything before commencing JavaScript. It helps the web pages to be much more flexible, for instance, the way JavaScript operates, it blocks all below it from processing until it has done downloading.
If necessary, link to JavaScript just before you close the < body > tab of your HTML files. Read all on deferring JavaScript loading to find all.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The speed of your site is strongly influenced by the range of the user opposed to your web server. The farther away they are, the higher the range the data sent would have to glide. Keeping the content stored through several geographically positioned regions and countries help to solve this problem.
Here, A CDN, however, creates the running expense a little higher, but you’re surely going to get a speed boost in this way.
- Optimize Web Caching
In addition to utilizing caching systems, you can design websites that use online caching in a frequent way. Moreover, Data caching is where files are saved for further usage by a web server. Things that browsers may cover include JavaScript files, CSS files, and images.
Apart from the standard practices, such as placing CSS and JavaScript content that is included in multiple pages across external directories, there are other options too that make sure that you are caching the files in the most effective manner.
If you use WordPress, then you can install a WP Super Cache or WP Total Cache plugin, one of the fastest and easiest ways to reduce your page loading speed. You can also skip this point if you already have WP Engine.
- Minify resources
‘Minify’ implies to remove unwanted CSS or JavaScript codes that automatically amplify web page loading speed. Code removal is a smart way to boost the efficiency of web sites.
Besides, check the coding; if these contain extra page breaks, spaces, and line breaks, then try to remove these elements, and after doing this, it will automatically lead to website performance.
- Enable Gzip compression
Gzip compression has been one of the easiest ways to improve page load speed. Before it sends them to the server, it compresses HTML & CSS files. When a user reaches a web server, compression is tested with Gzip.
Server with compression-enabled Gzip can easily fetch the file that is far smaller than the uncompressed version. For the best practice, you must use Gzip compression, since it can reduce the page size up to 70%.
- Use fewer redirects
It will generate an additional HTTP request if you move to another web page. This tends to increase the load time of the page.
For instance, does the redirecting of mobile look like this: www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, or yourdomain.com?? If so, then just because of all these redirects, the website may load even slower.
Final thoughts:
So these were some of the outstanding steps that you must implement on your website that will surely improve the speed for web page loading. Ultimately, soon your website traffic will be skyrocketing.