Website loading speed directly affects the quality of its promotion in search engines. This is one of the major ranking factors. Plus, customer behavior depends on how quickly the site loads.
For example, let’s say you’ve visited a website to book a van rental Minneapolis Airport for your future family trip. It’s easy and fast to rent a car online. You just need to choose a car rental location and the start/end dates of the trip. The only thing that can prevent you from doing this is the slow website loading speed. Indeed, you won’t wait 10-20 seconds for the page to open. This factor is especially critical for mobile web browsing.
Therefore, it’s very important that the website loads quickly and the customer can enjoy smooth operation. Moreover, it will help your site to rank higher in the search engines.
The speed of loading web pages depends on the content weight, site code, and hosting quality. You can optimize them in the following ways…
Optimize website source code
- Compress HTML code
You can do this in several ways:
- Manually. For example, use gzip or brotli compression algorithms. However, this method is not suitable for beginners. You either need to be a programmer or contact specialists.
- Through the code compressor. Just upload the code to the service page, and it will display the compressed code. You need to copy and paste it instead of the original one. An example of such a service is htmlcompressor.com. It compresses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. Unfortunately, this method has disadvantages. First, you need to understand where to find the page code and how to replace it. Secondly, this method is not suitable for big websites, because code compressing takes too much time if you have a lot of content.
- Through the use of plugins. For example, for WordPress, the most popular ones are Autoptimize, Hyper Cache, Minify HTML, Clearfy Pro, Fast Velocity Minify.
- Remove the code parts you don’t need
Remove extra spaces, hyphens, duplicates, unnecessary JavaScript libraries, and third-party codes. This is where code compressors come in handy again, but also, there are a few things you can do manually. For example, if you write articles in Google Docs, then extra fragments will appear in the code after you insert the text into the site editor. You need to remove them. In WordPress, it’s easy to do through the Clear Formatting option.
- Configure caching
Caching allows you not to download all the website content every time the user opens the page, but to do it only the first time. Then the browser loads data from the cache for a configured period. For example, if you set caching for a week, then the page will be loaded once a week, and the rest of the time – from the cache.
- Disable or remove unnecessary plugins
This applies to CMS-based sites. The more plugins, the more load on the server. Therefore, leave only the most essential ones. Plus, you can replace some plugins by adding code to the page or switching to another theme with this feature already included.
Optimize your Web Hosting
- Pay attention to hardware resources
When a website gets more traffic and more content, it requires more resources on the server. You can see the amount of consumed resources in your hosting account. Check it out, and it may be time for you to buy more RAM, add hard disk space, or even go to a dedicated server if you have been on shared hosting before.
- Choose a hosting with built-in website optimization tools
Popular hosts offer additional tools to speed up your site, for example:
- fast SSD drives instead of HDDs;
- great choice of hosting locations;
- LiteSpeed web server, which is 5 times faster than Apache;
- built-in free caching plugin for WordPress;
- CDN CloudFlare included.
Optimize media content
Content can dramatically increase website loading time, especially if not optimized. What can you do to prevent this?
- Add videos through external resources
Instead of uploading the video to hosting, it’s better to add it via a link from YouTube or Vimeo. In some cases, you can also add video via code. For example, this works well for Tik-Tok videos.
- Don’t use too large image sizes
The optimal image size is not more than 2,000 pixels in width and no more than 600 Kb in volume. If you have a blog with a lot of pictures, then the size maybe even smaller. When choosing a size, also consider the convenience of users so that they can see important information in the pictures.
- Compress images before uploading them to the site
Special services allow you to reduce the weight of the file within 70% – 80% percent. These are TinyPNG, iloveimg, ImageOptim, Compressor, or Optimizilla. You can also use plugins to compress all images on the site that are already hosted. Use such services as EWWW Image Optimizer, Resize Image After Upload, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, or Imagify.
- Configure Lazy Loading
Lazy Loading is a mode in which the engine loads images as the page scrolls, but not all at once. And if the user hasn’t scrolled to the end, the lower images won’t be loaded. This improves the page load time. Tilda’s Lazy Load works by default. On WordPress, you can use plugins such as Lazy Loading Feature Plugin, BJ Lazy Load, or Lazy Load XT.
- Switch to a lighter image format
JPG is lighter than PNG, while WebP is lighter than JPG. By the way, Tilda automatically converts images to WebP format. This allows you to get up to 35% less weight than JPG without losing quality. You can use PNG if you want to keep transparency and high quality.
Well, the right code, hosting, and content optimization will greatly increase the website loading speed. As a result, you will achieve improvements in traffic, targeted actions on the website, and its position in the search engine. Better to apply most of the tips ahead of time, as soon as you launch the site, because fixing mistakes is always more difficult than preventing them.