4 Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed.

The faster the site, the more effectively it ranks in search engines and provides better interaction with users – this is reflected in targeted traffic, increased conversions, and increased revenue. 

Optimizing the speed of loading pages is the No. 1 task for any project. The faster the site, the more effectively it ranks in search engines and provides better interaction with users – this is reflected in targeted traffic, increased conversions, and increased revenue. This is a truism, which, however, often goes into the background or is completely ignored during the SEO optimization of the site. In this article, we will talk about what is included in the basic pool of works to improve the speed of loading pages.

How to check the speed of the site? 

PageSpeed Insights is Google’s tool for monitoring the loading speed of a website. The service generates reports separately on mobile and desktop pages. In addition to data, PageSpeed Insights gives personalized recommendations on how and what to fix on the site to improve speed. Observations show that the reports of this tool are not accurate, however, they can be taken as a basis for recommended parameters from Google. A significant plus is the Russian-language interface.

GTMetrix is a powerful free service for monitoring the speed of loading pages on an extensive list of indicators. For a more accurate analysis of performance, many subtle settings are provided: here you can choose the location of the user, the type of browser used, and other parameters. In addition to the numbers, GTMetrix also provides useful recommendations pointing out site vulnerabilities and solutions. Mastering the program and analyzing numerous metrics takes time, but it’s worth it if you want to achieve a tangible improvement in download speed. Interface in English.

Best Ways to Speed Up Your Website.

By checking the site with several tools, you will get an accurate picture of the speed of loading pages. Most problems will not require in-depth knowledge and skills to fix them. But part of the optimization, primarily implemented at the code level, is better delegated to specialists. Next, we’ll look at a typical list of issues that degrade page load times and give you tips on how to fix them.

Reduce the size of the HTML code:

The size of the HTML code directly affects the loading speed: the heavier the files, the more resources the browser spends to render the page. Optimally, if the size of HTML does not exceed 100-200 kilobytes. Optimization in this case involves the removal of everything unnecessary: repeated spaces, line breaks, comments to the code, extra characters, etc.

This can be done in two ways: manually and with the help of special tools. For obvious reasons, the second method is more popular among webmasters: it does not require layout skills and allows you to significantly speed up the work. Before you optimize documents, it is advisable to make backup copies. Even though there are no special complaints about modern services and plugins for compressing HTML code, precautions still will not hurt.

Image Optimization

On most sites, pictures are among the heaviest files, which take the bulk of the bandwidth to download. On average, 45% of the weight of the page is reserved for images. They become the bottleneck, which increases the response time. Therefore, optimizing graphic content is a priority for those who want to speed up their website. Three ways to address this issue are the most effective.

Photo compression without loss of quality

Proven assistants in this matter are the following cloud services.

JPEG Compressor is an online service that allows you to compress images weighing up to 10 MB for free. A variety of compression formats are available, lossy and lossless. Compression can reach up to 90%.

Deactivate unnecessary plugins:

One of the important advantages of CMS sites is the availability of installing all kinds of plugins that extend the functionality of the web resource. With them, many webmasters quickly lose their sense of proportion. The prospect of making your website more functional and effective in a few clicks seems very appealing. But this phenomenon has a downside – for the operation of each plug-in you need server resources. Additional software modules increase the number of requests to the database, which in turn significantly increases the page load time. If you see that an overabundance of plugins slows down the site – disable the extra ones. The second option for solving this problem is the transition to a hosting tariff, with an increased number of allocated resources.

GZIP compression

GZIP compression is another caching mechanism, but at the server level. The technology minimizes the total amount of data that the server sends to the end user. GZIP can reduce the size of web pages and CSS by up to 50-70%, thereby achieving a significant reduction in page load time.

conclusion

The importance of page loading speed is beyond doubt. No matter how high-quality and optimized with the same basic SEO the site is, it’s slow loading can negate the success of the entire project. The standard pool of work to speed up the site includes optimizing images, cleaning the html code from unnecessary garbage, setting up client and server caching, using AMP and Turbo pages, as well as other practices discussed in detail above. Focusing on internal optimization, it is important not to forget about using quality hosting that corresponds to the current loads of the site. And finally, the most important thing is that the download speed should be checked on a regular basis.