How to Improve Your Website Speed and Performance?
A website that doesn’t load within two seconds can say goodbye to more than 50% of its users, especially when it comes to mobile browsing. Slow sites lead to high bounce rates, which in turn lead to lower rankings in search engines and the loss of potential customers who are unlikely to return.
So, what are the basic steps every website owner should take to ensure their site’s speed is good to excellent?
Use a Fast Server
A server response time of 200ms or less is considered optimal. To achieve such speed, check various factors that influence it, including memory size, the server hosting company, software the server runs, the amount of traffic to the site, and the sources serving different web pages.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of servers that significantly reduces bandwidth and requests from websites whose media files are stored on it, thus substantially contributing to faster website loading.
How does it work? Instead of having our website’s media files sit in one place and overload the server, they are spread across a network of sites around the world. For example, when someone from France visits our site, the files are downloaded from a server located close to that user.
Popular content delivery networks include Cloudflare, Cloudwatch, and Amazon CloudFront.
Use Caching
Another way to improve site loading time is through caching – saving existing files and reusing them via the user’s browser.
Each time a browser loads a web page, it must download all the network files (HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images) for the page to display properly. In cases where pages contain many large files, the load time is longer, partly because each file sends a separate request to the server, overloading it and slowing down the page load.
General guidelines suggest that static content (such as global CSS files, logos, and even certain content pages like “About” and “Contact”) should be stored for a year, while other content should be kept for a week.
In the context of caching, it is recommended to use well-known fonts (like Arial) because most sites use these fonts, and therefore there is a high chance that the visitors’ browsers have already saved them, so no time is wasted on loading them.
Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML Files
Optimizing the site’s code is also recommended for both site speed and SEO. The less code on a page, the easier it is for search engines’ scanning robots to scan the code and understand the important content it contains. Reducing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files can significantly increase site speed. Recommended tools for minimizing these files include UglifyJS and CSSnano. WordPress site owners can use plugins like WP Rocket or Autoptimize that do several things besides file reduction, such as lazy loading, caching, CDN, and more.
Remove Render-Blocking JavaScript
Rendering pages by the browser requires building a DOM tree by parsing HTML. Any script the browser encounters during this process forces it to stop and execute it before continuing. Google’s recommendation is to minimize and/or avoid JavaScript blockages, especially of external scripts.
Any script required to produce the page content should be inlined to avoid unnecessary network requests. Any other script that is not necessary for the original processing of the content should be asynchronous or deferred until after the initial processing.
Reduce the Number of Redirects
Each time a page on the site redirects to another, the site visitor has to wait longer for the desired page to load. Therefore, it is advisable to minimize redirects and, every few weeks, go through the site’s redirects and delete those that are no longer necessary. For example, if you have a redirect from mysite.com/old-page to mysite.com/new-page and the old page is no longer indexed by Google and has no links (neither within the site nor externally) – you can remove the redirect.
This action will contribute to a better user experience, and accordingly, the search engines will also be happier, especially regarding their crawl budget on your site.
