The longer a page takes to load, the more conversions it costs you.
To improve something, you first need to understand where you stand on that metric. So to improve page speeds, you start by measuring page speed.
The details below will get a little technical, so bear with me.
Why Is Page Load Time Important?
Page loading speeds are a critical factor in determining a site’s usability . Google considers page speed one of 200 ranking factors that affect a site’s position in organic results and improve user experience. Since slow sites mean a poor user experience, faster page loading can directly translate to higher rankings.
Competition is always there to get higher traffic and those who offer better usability mean you are ahead of your competitors.
That’s not all. Having a faster page load time can also increase your site’s crawl rate. The faster your pages load, the more pages Google can crawl at once, meaning Google can crawl a larger portion of your site at once.
High page speed also increases the popularity of the site among Google crawlers. This means that search spiders will start visiting your site more often, which is good news. It is also worth mentioning that the host and server you choose also determines the page load time. Managed WordPress hosting, dedicated hosting armenia phone number resources etc. are good choices for better speed.
The point to note here is that if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, the bounce rate triples.
Webpage load time vs bounce rates
Source: Pingdom
The process works like this: A user types a domain name into their browser and presses enter, expecting to see the information on the page.
After some time the page starts loading and the user can interact with the page and after some time the entire page gets loaded. The time taken for the page to load completely is very important.
Users may have already found the information before the page has fully loaded. And if it takes too long to load, others may have given up and left the site.
As you can see, a lot happens while a site is loading, and this impacts how a user experiences your site .
How to Understand Page Loading Time?
There are two main methods for measuring page speed:
Page load time: This shows the time between when the browser sends a request to the server and when the page fully renders itself.
Time to first byte: This shows the time between the first request being sent to the server and the browser receiving the first byte of data.
When working to optimize your site speed, focusing on reducing page load time and time to first byte should be your two biggest priorities. It’s often easier to get a faster page using these methods. However, it’s also worth noting that Google measures a page’s speed as time to first byte, also known as TTFB. You need to get ahead of TTFB to rank better.
How to Measure Page Speed/Site Speed?
Before you make any changes to your site, consider its performance. There are multiple tools available to test and measure page speed. Two good solutions are the Pingdom speed test and GTmetrix, which offers beginner-friendly options.
Website Performance and Availability Monitoring - Pingdom
Source: Pingdom
#1. Optimize with Google Page Speed Insights
You can also check your site’s performance with Google PageSpeed Insights, which generates a list of easy-to-implement recommendations that can improve your page speed in minutes.
This tool from Google gives you everything you need to do to optimize for the metrics Google cares about. Enter the URL of the page in the text field. Then click Analyze.
how to reduce your websites page speed
PageSpeed Insights then analyzes the content on the page and scores it on a scale of 1 to 100. You will also find recommendations to improve the page's loading speed. The following report is for my site: kamayobloggers.com/blog.
There are many suggestions here.
PageSpeed-Insights.png
PageSpeed-Insights22.png
Source: Pagespeed Insights
You also get a separate list of scores and recommendations for both the desktop and mobile versions of the site, giving you a handy list of recommendations that you can use to optimize both the mobile and desktop versions of your site separately.
This information will give you a starting point to understand and optimize the speed of your pages. You can also hire a CTO as a startup service to solve all your technical issues .
#2. Choose a Managed Host
The host you use plays a major role in your website’s performance as well as its management. This includes page speed. One mistake you make with mediocre hosting is that you lose out on revenue while saving on monthly fees. Cheap hosting is the number one culprit for slow page loads. Cheap hosting clubs share the same resources with multiple sites on overloaded servers, which can strain your page load times.
Performance-focused hosts like Kinsta give you a platform optimized for speed.
#3. Compress and Optimize Your Images
Images beautify web pages while improving the quality of content. However, large images slow down your site. People have become better readers nowadays, so you need to provide quality and well-researched content with a long-term goal. This means that you cannot do without images. However, you can definitely optimize them.
Optimizing images involves changing file formats (from PNG/JPG to WEBP), enabling lazy loading, and compressing images via lossless compression.
When you reduce the image file size, you also reduce their weight, which makes the page load faster. There are plugins you can use for this, such as WP Smush.
Once you install and activate the plugin, it resizes and compresses images without affecting the quality. It includes lossless compression, lazy loading, and bulk image optimization features.
You can use plugins as they have multiple compression options to effectively reduce the size by 85%.
The plugin also uses the Webp format which allows for lazy loading and other features.
An example I can give is Fyle . Their blog is full of quality content on expense management. There are at least 400 articles covering different aspects of expense management, bookkeeping, international payments, and global banking. All of their images are optimized and load quickly. Imagine if all of this were not optimized. The site would take forever to load.
Image Optimization - Flye Homepage
Source: Fyle
#4. Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching is another form of caching to improve load times. This allows your browser to store information such as stylesheets, images, and javascript files. A user doesn’t have to reload the page with all these different elements every time they visit the page.
Just like W3 total cache, WP Rocket is also a powerful caching plugin that you can use on your site. It provides page caching and preloading to optimize page speed. WP Rocket is another plugin with the same features.
For example, see this page on outsourcing customer service . Browser caching means that all images on a page are stored locally, so that the page loads quickly the next time it is called up.
