The loading speed of your website is a key factor for good conversion and also for good ranking in search engine charts. What's more, if your site takes more than 4 seconds to load, 79% of those who visit it will not return. Additionally, 52% of online shoppers admit that website loading speed is important for them to become loyal to an online store. A single second of delay could cost you around 40% of your visitors!
Thus, Google stated back in 2018 that mobile pages should display content to users in under 2.5 seconds, and the total size of a mobile web page should be less than 500 KB.
Make sure your website pages are loading fast enough with website loading speed analysis tools like:
- Page speed insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev/) - a reliable tool for analyzing website and web page loading speed:
Speed Score tells you in general about the loading speed (Fast, average, or slow).
Optimization Score shows the site's performance capacity (Good, medium, or low).
Page Load Distribution is the distribution of the loading speed from the first appearance of the content on the page until the complete loading of the page content.
Page Stats suggests if the page loading speed can be improved. The programmer should optimize CSS files and image sizes and deal with resource optimization.
Optimization Suggestions provides a list of recommendations to apply to your page to increase loading speed.
2. GTmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com) – an online tool that analyzes the performance and speed of websites, providing improvement suggestions, statistics, and recommendations specific to the analyzed website.
- Summary - an overview with some basic statistics of the site.
- The Breakdown comes with key recommendations for the items that need the most attention.
3. Pingdom (https://tools.pingdom.com/) – an automated ping tool (i.e., it measures how long it takes to get a response from the site). The ping time with the server hosting the site's content is added to the time it takes to get a response from the site, so it directly influences the site's loading speed.
Here's what you can do to improve your site's loading speed:
Enable Gzip compression to reduce the size of each file the site serves.
Leverage browser caching – code that does browser-side caching and expiration of CSS/JS files, as well as images.
Defer parsing of JavaScript – Move the JavaScript code to the footer of the site (at the bottom of the page), and put JavaScript at the bottom. This ensures that the visitor views the page while the browser is downloading JavaScript files. Otherwise, the browser must first download all JavaScript files before rendering the page.
Image compression by code optimization tools:
- https://tinypng.com/ – Here, images of up to 5 MB can be optimized.
- https://imagecompressor.com/ – bigger images (though here, you lose a little more quality).
- Place images in Webp format (if possible).
Limit resources on the page (not too many elements on one page, such as parallax, video, podcast, etc.).
Videos only opened on YouTube (do not upload them directly to the site).
Do not use images that are too wide; use the actual size that will be displayed on the site. For good results, resize images before uploading (via tools like TinyPNG) or directly from the panel (such as in WordPress via WP Smush). Pay attention to the dimensions of the images you place; these data speak for themselves:
-1200 pixels wide: 394kb
-1000 pixels wide: 298kb
-800 pixels wide: 219kb
-600 pixels wide: 154kb.
- Use lazy loading– Images at the top of the page take priority, while images below are loaded only when the visitor scrolls down. This makes loading "just-in-time" equivalent to loading web pages. Use Optimole (plugin).
- Use a cache – Good plugins for WordPress would be WP Super Cache, Breeze (file minification + caching), and WP Fastest Cache (disable emojis, file minification + caching).
Ensure that our website is hosted on good hosting (preferably VPS or dedicated server).
Periodically update plugins.
Delete spam – For WordPress, use the Advanced Invisible Anti-Spam plugin to stop fake comments.
Avoid overloading the website with plugins.
Avoid multipurpose themes in WordPress.
Use a CDN – A distributed system of servers that loads from the nearest server. For example, if the user is in Germany, it tries to load the images and scripts from a server close to that country.
Limit the maintenance of the revision history in the databases (maximum 1-2 revisions).
Reduce the number of external resources used (e.g., images from other sites).
Database optimization – For WordPress, use plugins like WP-Sweep or WP-Optimize for database optimization.
Disable Emojis Plugin – Disable a script from WP that we don't need and delete other unnecessary plugins.
Minify JS and CSS files – For WordPress, use the "Autoptimize" plugin.
By speeding up your site's load time, you gain about 16% more satisfied customers and improve your company's image by 44%. At the same time, you must remember that to keep the site in optimal operating parameters, you must periodically take care of optimizing the content and its operating speed. Good luck with optimizing!