Website loading is crucial, as it is directly related to your website’s sales, performance, bounce rate, conversion rate, SEO ranking, and more. It is so important that Google has included the loading speed in the core vitals. The core vitals used by the Google algorithm judge websites in terms of user experience. A good user experience means visitors will stay on the website and explore different pages to understand the products or services.
When the loading speed is poor, the visitors do not spend much time on the websites. According to the experts, the bounce rate may shoot up by 32% when a website’s loading speed increases from one second to three seconds. Therefore, a small change in loading speed may have a dire impact on your website. The following section discusses a few simple tricks to improve the website’s loading speed.
Testing Website’s Speed and Performance
Before moving forward to optimizing the website’s loading speed, you should understand the procedure for testing the website’s performance. While testing the website’s speed and performance, you need to consider various metrics. Knowing them is crucial in case you cannot figure out the actual reason behind the sluggish speed of your website.
Google Lighthouse, a free tool introduced by Google, is one of the best tools for inspecting the speed and performance of websites. Besides the free tools, you will find various premium tools to check the factors that impact the loading speed. When it comes to analyzing the Core Web Vitals, three metrics are crucial.
- Largest Contentful Paint: This metric measures the largest element of a website when a page is loading.
- First Input Delay: Google measures how quickly a website responds to user input through this core vital.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: The visual stability of a website during the page loading has been judged through this core web vital.
Other crucial metrics for judging the website’s speed are Time to Interactive, DNS lookup speed, and First Byte. Keeping these factors in mind is essential to optimize the loading speed. Now, let us check out some proven and effective measures that optimize the loading speed drastically.
Useful Tips to Improve Website Performance
Your website’s speed can dramatically get better if you follow the tips discussed in the following section. Building a strong website loading speed optimization strategy will eventually help your business grow faster.
1. Image Optimization
Does your website contain images that are high in resolution? A high-resolution image will take a long time to load, irrespective of the website hosting service that you have chosen. You need to identify such image files on your website. The first job is reducing the resolutions of these images. As you reduce the resolution, you will see changes in the file sizes. Therefore, the images will be easier and quicker to load, and your website’s overall loading speed will improve.
2. Limit HTTP Request Number
The second crucial measure for website speed optimization is reducing the HTTP request number. The website pages require browsers to make multiple HTTP requests to fetch various assets such as scripts, images, CSS files, etc. You can minimize these requests by minimizing the objects on your website. Embracing a minimalistic website interface can prove useful in this regard. You may require the assistance of a professional website developer.
3. Remove Render-Blocking JavaScript
Your website may have unnecessary codes, which load every time someone visits or refreshes the website. Having such unnecessary render-blocking codes reduces the loading speed significantly. In such cases, you need to omit such codes to improve the website loading speed. The website owners can use the web performance tool to identify such unnecessary codes that you may find on poorly performing pages.
4. Cut Short JavaScript and CSS Files
Long JavaScript and CSS files could also harm the page loading speed of a website. In such cases, you need to reduce the sizes of these files. You need to optimize coding and reduce the unnecessary codes to minimize the file sizes. The overall procedure is not time-consuming, especially when you have advanced technical knowledge and expertise.
5. Change the Website Hosting Service
Your website loading speed is poor due to the poor hosting service. A professional hosting service ensures 99.99% uptime, though it is not the only measuring factor to judge a service provider’s effectiveness. Additionally, you need to check the bandwidth allocation.
Typically, an unlimited bandwidth is ideal for hosting a website with multiple pages. A good bandwidth, along with the best server locations, will fetch the best result for your website. Moreover, you should have enough storage space to accommodate your web data. Without a large storage space, you will experience a gradually deteriorating website speed.
Final Verdict
In the end, it needs to be stated that website loading speed depends on multiple factors. However, picking a good hosting service for your website is imperative in this regard. A fast loading speed indicates that your business website will have a low bounce rate. A low bounce rate ensures a high conversion rate, which means converting the visitors into buyers.