Website speed is crucial for ensuring a positive user experience. The faster your website loads, the better experience your users will have. This will also positively impact your SEO, helping to bring more web traffic to your site. In this article, we cover 10 top tips for optimising your website speed.
1. Audit your site speed
The first step in optimising your website speed is to analyse the performance of your web pages. Fortunately, there are a few ways you can assess your site speed. The most popular tool is Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
This is a free tool that provides you with a wealth of data for assessing your website speed. All you need to do is enter the URL of your web page into the search bar and click ‘Analyze’. Once the results are in, you can get insights into your speeds on mobile and desktop.
PageSpeed Insights uses a traffic light system depending on the score you obtain. Green indicates a healthy score, amber is a score that could be improved, and red is a score that needs urgent attention. The metric is based on a scale of 0 to 100 (with 100 being the best score).
PageSpeed Insights will also provide some tips or ‘diagnostics’ for how you can improve your score:
2. Page loading stages
It’s also important that you understand the different stages that occur when a webpage loads. This will help you better understand the tips and metrics you receive from PageSpeed Insights, as well as how to best improve your page speeds.
When it comes to a browser rendering a page, there are four different stages:
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): The time it takes for the initial response from the server to start loading the page.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): The time it takes for the user to see the first visible element on the page, such as an image or text.
- First Input Delay (FID): The time it takes for your website to react to the user’s first interaction, like clicking a button or a link.
- Onload Time: The duration required for the entire content of the page to fully load.
3. Optimise your images
One element of your website that can seriously impact your website speed is images. That’s because, for every user that visits your page, the browser has to download all the images from the server. Many images or large file sizes can impact your page speeds.
Images play a crucial role in web design and are important for both function and aesthetic appeal. Not only do you need to choose the right images, but you also need to optimise them to keep your page speeds to a minimum.
This involves picking a suitable file type (such as JPG or PNG) and finding a balance between compression, quality, resolution, and size. As each file type offers different benefits and drawbacks, you’ll need to pick the best file type for your needs.
Find out more about optimising images in web design
4. Implement lazy loading
Lazy loading is a technique you can implement to help keep your page speeds down. This technique involves delaying a browser from rendering certain elements, such as images until it nears the user’s position on a page.
Implementing lazy loading effectively can have a big impact on improving the efficiency of your page speeds. Depending on where you want to implement lazy loading, it will change how you implement it.
For example, if you just want to add lazy loading to images, you can just add a tag to the HTML code. This would be <img src=”image-file-name.jpg” loading=”lazy” alt=”Your image alt text”>.
However, if you wish to implement lazy loading across more site elements, such as JavaScript or CSS, you’ll need a different method. If you’re using a CMS platform for your site, such as WordPress, there are a range of different plug-ins that will do the heavy lifting for you.
5. Minify CSS and JavaScript
Alongside implementing lazy loading you can also minify code. This removes unnecessary spaces and unused code from your files. Not only does this help reduce the file sizes, but it also allows a browser to process the files much faster.
There are several tools you can use to help minify code files, including CSSNano, HTMLMinifier, and UglifyJS. You can also install a relevant plug-in to your CMS.
6. Enable browser caching / server-side caching
Browser caching is an effective method of optimising your website speeds for returning visitors. As the name suggests, browser caching involves storing page resources in the user’s system so that when the same user returns, the browser uses the pre-loaded cached resources.
As a result, the browser has to make fewer requests to the server. This allows pages to render much quicker due to the use of pre-loaded or cached resources. Browser caching can be implemented using browser caching headings or adjusting the settings in your CMS.
Server-side caching is another effective method, creating quick loading cached page files to server to your website users. Some website hosts will provide this as an option. Alternatively, plugins are available that will do the job for you, including WP Rocket and WP Super Cache.
7. Enable Gzip compression
Enabling Gzip compression is another technique you can implement for optimising your website speed. Enabling Gzip compression on your server reduces the size of text-based files. Gzip compression can be up to five times more effective at reducing file sizes compared to minifying.
To implement Gzip compression, you can either add a WordPress plug-in or via the .htaccess file through your hosting provider control panel. This helps significantly reduce the amount of data transferred between the server and the user’s browser, which improves your website speeds.
8. Improve your hosting provider or server
Improving your hosting provider or server can also help optimise your website speeds. Choosing a reliable hosting provider with fast servers optimised for your site’s needs can benefit your website speed. Also, implementing server-side optimisations, such as caching and load balancing, can help your website speed.
9. Cut down redirects
Link redirects or URL forwarding occurs when a user lands on a different page than the one they requested. Adding redirects can be a good way to improve your user experience by preventing users from landing on a broken or duplicate page.
However, too many redirects can seriously impact your website speed by adding to the server overhead or delaying the load of the page. As such, you should only use redirects when it is necessary.
10. Limit your font choices
Limiting your font choices is also another method for optimising your website speed. In particular, you should avoid using lots of custom fonts, as browsers have to download each font when rendering a page.
Instead, consider using a limited number of web fonts. Web or browser fonts are a range of fonts that are widely pre-installed on user’s systems. As such, browsers don’t have to download the fonts to render a page. The full list of web-safe fonts are:
- Arial
- Verdana
- Tahoma
- Trebuchet
- Times New Roman
- Georgia
- Garamond
- Courier New
- Brush Script MT
Optimising your website speed is crucial for improving your user experience and SEO. By following the tips above, you can ensure your pages load quickly and efficiently, whether on mobile or desktop. This ensures you retain visitors, boost engagement, and drive conversions.