How to improve your page speed – A complete guide

Page speed is one of the critical factors in Digital Marketing, it creates a significant impact on how long your visitors stay on your website.

What is the conversion rate and where you will rank on search engines.

Nowadays people are looking for the quickest things and when they surf something on the internet, they expect the website which they select to load as quickly as possible.

Also, the one which does not load has to face negative feedback from the user.

As per the research, one percent delay in page load time. Ends with 11% fewer page views, 16% depreciation in customer satisfaction, and a 7% percent of loss in conversion rate.

So now you must have understood the importance of page speed for your website’s existence.

Here in this article, let us understand how to improve your page speed, but before that let us understand what makes the page speed low.

6 Reasons why your page speed is low

• Unoptimized images

A huge volume of unoptimized images is the most common reason to reduce or decrease your page speed.

High-resolution images create a lot of bandwidth while loading the page.

As mentioned above, the image format is one of the major factors for maintaining page speed.

Such JPEG images are the ones which is available in a smaller size.

Apart from this PNG or GIFs (Larger size images) JPEGs are recommended for your website.

• A lot of Flash content

Flash content adds interactivity to your website.

It is considered to be one of the best tools to attract your customers. But Flash contents are usually bulky in size, which makes your page speed low, therefore you should completely avoid using them or try to reduce the file size of your flash content.

If you want to make your website faster you should look for HTML% alternatives and replace your existing flash content.

• Uneven or unclean code

Another thing that reduces the page speed is unclean code, unclean code means excessive white space, inline stylings, or empty new lines can increase the stylesheet of your website which increases the file size.

Removing unclean code can help you to improve your page speed.

• Too many ads

Ads can surely help to bring traffic to your website, but when those ads are not helping your page to load quickly then you need to cut them out.

Adding several ads to your website will give access to unwanted HTTP requests, that will need additional processing time.

So use these ads only when you need them to improve your User Experience.

• JavaScript Issues

JavaScript plugins had made it easy to add any type of dynamic content to your website.

If the content is implemented incorrectly, then it can affect your page speed.

It takes time for JavaScript to be loaded and executed. So if you are using multiple API calls to render JavaScript data it can result in a delay.

• Bad hosting

The web hosting service provider makes a huge difference when it comes to website performance.

This might not be entirely your fault. Choose a hosting provider that offers a performance optimization service. 

Why should you care about page speed?

• You might get negative feedback from the users or visitors of the page because a delay or lagging while loading a page can make your website face similar consequences.

• If your website loads faster then you can record more visitors because the analytic tag will load sooner. 

• Speed update only impacts the slowest site as per the official announcement.

• An increase in page speed will lead to an increase in organic traffic, more visitors in general, and click visit ratio on the ad.

How to boost up your page speed

As we know what are the main reasons for lower page speed, now we will understand how we can improvise your page speed.

• Minimize HTTP requests

As per the recent statement by Yahoo, 80% of web page load time is spent on downloading different parts of pages such as images, stylesheets, etc.

You start downloading each one of the pages here the HTTP request is made for all of them which increases the page components and takes longer to load. In Google Chrome, you can make use of the browser’s developer tool and check how many requests your site is doing.

Right-click on the page that you want to check and click on inspect.

In Inspect click on the Network tab, the name column shows all the files on the page, the size column will show all the sizes for every file and the time column will show how long it takes to load.

And at the bottom, you will see the number of total requests your site is making. Here you can check which of them are unnecessary.

• Reduce server response time

Server response time is affected by the amount of traffic you receive, resources used by each page, software your server uses, and hosting solutions. To improvise your server response time slow down the database queries, slow routing, and fix them. 

• Use a content distribution network

Content distribution networks are also known as content delivery networks, these networks have used the load of delivering content.

Essentially, copies of your site are stored in multiple data centers. This helps to get faster and more reliable access to your website.

• Optimize Images

Make sure that the images you use on your website are not larger than its requirement, usually, PNGs and GIFs have bulk files and therefore website takes time to load.

So using JPEGs for your website is a better option. This reduces loading time.

And does not make your visitors wait until the image is loaded.

Fast loading time is one of the important components of user experience and now it is one of google’s components for ranking purposes and page views.