Website speed optimization makes the first impression of your business.

It’s essential to understand that you’re not going to get a second chance when it comes to user experience.

The website’s low speed is one of the most frustrating things that will turn people away from your resource.

High-performance websites result in high return visits, low bounce rates, higher conversions, engagement, more top organic search rankings, and better user experience.

Slow websites will cost you money, and your reputation will be damaged.

By reducing experience time, you will have a positive impact on marketing and sales processes. You will get higher traffic and attract more qualified leads that can be converted into customers.

In this article, we will advise you on how to do the website’s speed optimization.

Importance of website speed optimization

Page load time is a web performance metric that shows the time needed to display a page on the user’s screen.

Take a look at the website’s speed optimization, which influences the website’s key factors:

• Conversion
• Visibility
• Usability

Conversion: Website Conversion is an essential factor in your business success. Which means getting your visitors to do what you want them to do.

For example, they will purchase your product, subscribe to newsletter campaigns, register for a webinar, or download a guide.

Visibility: Loading time on your website also affects how easily users can find your website. Site speed is one of the factors that Google takes into account when ranking sites.

A low-performance website has poor user experience, resulting in less promotion of search results.

The Google search engine has also started ranking based on mobile versions of pages, including desktop searches. This decision aims to protect users from websites with low performance and are not responsive to all devices.

Usability: Customers rate businesses based on their websites nowadays, which is why website metrics such as speed, load time and responsiveness to user request are vital.

The better your site does, the more satisfied the user will be. Excellent user experience is a way to build a large customer base and a strong brand.

Ways to assess your website speed

Before starting your website speed optimization, you should determine your current loading time and slow down your site.

Then you should set the performance targets of your website.

According to Google’s research on average mobile speed across industry sectors, only a fraction of websites are close to their recommended rate of three seconds.

If you optimize your website’s speed to an acceptable level, you will have a significant ranking advantage over your competitors.

The website speed optimization methods listed in this article are very different, and sometimes the solution to one problem may harm another aspect of your site.

We recommend an analysis of the website speed after each change to determine which actions deliver the best results.

There are several performance assessment tools worth trying out:

• Google Pagespeed Insights is a free Google tool that performs a performance test on your site and provides recommendations on how to increase performance. Works for both desktop and mobile versions.
• Pingdom is also a great website speed testing tool with several useful features. It tracks the performance history of your website, makes data-driven recommendations on improving website speed, and generates easy-to-understand reports. Pingdom also provides web-based speed testing apps for Android and iOS. It has free and professionally paid monitoring plans.
• YSlow also makes recommendations on how to improve page performance, compiles statistics, and summarizes all components.
• Performance Budget Calculator is a free tool that helps you figure out what kind of content you can use to keep your site running optimally.

Guidelines to speed up your website

Once you’ve tested the speed of your website, you can start optimizing it. There are many different ways to make your website work faster. We’ve created a list of the most efficient ones.

1. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The content delivery network is a set of web servers distributed across different geographical locations. That provides end-users with web content in terms of area.

When you host a website on a single server, all requests from users are move to the same hardware.

For this reason, the time needed to process each request is increasing. On top of that, loading time increases when users are physically away from the server. User requests are redirected to the nearest server with CDN.

As a result, the content is delivered faster to the user, and the website works more quickly. It is a rather expensive, but quite efficient way to optimize the loading time.

2. Move your website to a better host

There are three types of hosting:

• Shared Hosting
• Virtual Private Servers (VPS) Hosting
• Dedicated servers

The most popular type of hosting used all over the world is hosting sharing. It is the cheapest way to get your site online quickly and at a low cost. It is essential to choose a fast web host to ensure better optimization.

With shared hosting, you share CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites that use this server as well. It is the main reason why shared hosting is not as fast as VPS or a dedicated server.

Virtual Private Servers and dedicated servers are much faster than before. VPS uses multiple content distribution servers.

Having VPS, you share a server with other users and have your part of a virtual server where your configurations do not affect other clients.

If your website has average traffic or you have traffic spikes on your eCommerce site. At some point in time, VPS will be the best solution for you.

The most expensive hosting option is to use a dedicated server that can be your physical server. In this case, you pay to rent a server and hire a system administrator to maintain it.

Another approach is to rent dedicated cloud resources from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or other public cloud providers.

Both methods can also be combined into a hybrid cloud we discussed recently. With dedicated servers, all resources are yours, and you get full control of them. Cloud infrastructures can also add unlimited and on-demand scalability to many packages.

Serverless architecture is yet another option that completely removes maintenance and sets up procedures for the server.

3. Optimize the website’s Image size

Everyone loves eye-catching pictures. Images are a vital part of successful eCommerce sites. A lot of photos, images, graphics on your product pages will improve your engagement.

The negative side of image usage is that they are usually large files that slow down the website.

To reduce the size of the image without compromising its quality, compress images using ImageOptim, JPEGmini, or Kraken.

The procedure may take a little time, but it’s worth it. Another way to reduce the size of the image is to use HTML responsive images. For eg < Image > and < size > attributes that adjust the size of the image. Based on the user display properties.

4. Reduce the number of plugins

Plugins are standard components of every website. They add special features suggested by third parties. Unfortunately, the more plugins you install, the more resources you need to run them.

As a result, the website works more slowly, and security issues can also appear. As time passes, the number of plugins increases, while some plugins may no longer avail. We recommend that you check all plugins that you have installed and delete unnecessary plugins.

First, run the performance tests on your page to determine which plugins will slow down your website. The website’s speed depends not only on the number of plugins installed but also on their quality.

Try avoiding plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries. The best solution is to keep only the important ones up to date and keep them up to date.

5. Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files available

Suppose your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files. It leads to a large number of HTTP requests when users of your site want to access specific data.

These requests are addressed individually by the visitor’s browser and slow down the work of the website. If you reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files, this will surely speed up your website.

Try to group all JavaScript into one, and do so with all CSS files as well. It will reduce the total number of HTTP requests. There are a lot of tools to minimize HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly.

For example, you can use WillPeavy, Script Minifier, or Grunt.

Conclusion

A typical consumer now expects to load web pages less than 3 seconds later. You will lose lots of website traffic and, thus, your sales if you do not reach this barrier of expectation.

Therefore, we recommend using a simple yet effective approach to speed optimization on the website:

Test, analyze, and consider conversion, visibility, and usability for critical factors of useful websites.

Test your current website speed and prioritize the most important pages and features concerning these three factors.

Start your optimization with the fastest aspects and concentrate on the pages that most determine your conversion performance.