How to improve your page load speed

Your website’s page load speed is a key factor in your company’s overall online presence.

Since your website is the online face of your business, it is often the first impression customers will have of your company. A slow page speed could harm your brand reputation and turn off potential clients. It also affects your website’s SEO.

Ensuring that your page load speed is optimized is critical for both user experience and your search engine rankings.

What are some of the steps you can take to boost your loading time? Here, we will outline several effective ways to improve your page load speed and maximize the performance of your site.

Check your current page speed

First, an analysis of your current page speed gives you important data about your website’s loading times.

For SEO purposes, Google recommends your page speed be kept under 2 seconds, particularly for eCommerce websites. In fact, almost half of all visitors will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

A comprehensive website audit can check your speed as well as provide an overview of performance issues. But a full audit isn’t required to test your page speed. There are plenty of tools available to measure your site’s speed and give you insight into possible improvements.

For example, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a popular, free tool that will provide you with several important metrics. This includes your page’s Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time To First Byte (TTFB), and more.

The tool will also diagnose issues and rate your site performance, so you have a thorough understanding of your current page speed. From there, you can determine the actions needed to fix what’s slowing down your site.

Use a better hosting service

Your website host plays a major role in your page speed. With a slow or underperforming web hosting service, you are more likely to experience lagging and excessive downtime.

Your host should not only provide security, backups, and maintenance for your website but also maintain a fast loading time.

Even if your site receives high levels of traffic, your web host should offer quick loading speeds. An enhanced hosting option can ensure your website stays up and running fast and consistently.

Compress images

If your image file sizes are too large, it can significantly impact your page speed. There are a number of tools you can use to compress your images, including JPEG Optimizer and Kraken.

In general, image file sizes should be kept between 200KB-1MB, with the majority of files at 300KB or less.

If your software allows, choose the “Save for web” option to optimize the resolution for your site.  This will make sure your photos and graphics display as crisp and clear as possible while keeping the file size low.

Reduce redirects

Limit the number of redirects on your website to improve your page speed.

Redirects automatically send your visitors to a different URL on your website. This requires additional HTTP requests, which can slow down your site.

A professional website audit or an online tool like SiteAnalyzer can check for redirects on your site. Some redirects can be necessary, but overall, reducing or eliminating redirects as much as possible will help your loading time decrease.

Remove unneeded plugins

These days, there are practically endless plugins you can use to enhance your website. On WordPress and other site builders, plugins can be used to add special features and functionality.

But due to the vast number of free plugins available, it can be easy to overload your site with too many. The more plugins you use, the more your site will slow down.

In addition, some plugins perform better than others. It is important to choose efficient, reliable plugins that won’t bog down your site.

If you use plugins, review them regularly to remove the ones you no longer need. You will also need to run regular updates to make sure they are working effectively and not breaking your site’s features.

Cache web pages

In order to reduce the amount of data that needs to load each time a visitor visits your site, you should enable caching.

Caching allows your visitor’s browser to store data from your website, like images, CSS stylesheets, and other files. This means that, when a customer returns to your website after their first visit, the pages will load much quicker.

There are a variety of plugins and online tools available to enable caching, like WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache. Utilizing these tools can make a considerable impact on your page load speed.

Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript files

CSS, JavaScript, and HTML are all elements of your website’s code. Just as it is important to compress your image files, you should also compress your lines of code to remove any excess.

To minify your code, enlist developers to look through your code to get rid of any unnecessary characters, like commas or spaces. They can also remove unused code, comments, or formatting to reduce the amount of code.

Or you can use a tool like HTMLMinifier, CSSNano, or UglifyJS to optimize your code. A complete review and minimization will help boost the speed of your pages.

Increasing your page speed improves your online presence

Since search engines like Google take page speed into account for SEO purposes, the faster your pages load, the higher you’re likely to rank. Additionally, a fast page speed helps to ensure a positive user experience, which increases the likelihood of conversions and sales.

But many companies, especially small businesses, don’t have the time or resources to fully optimize their page load speed. In those cases, you can reach out to a company like Robintek to help.

For more than 20 years, Robintek has provided effective digital solutions to help our clients reduce their page speed and make further effective improvements to their websites.

We can conduct a full audit of your site for current metrics and recommend adjustments. Our designers and developers can also implement the recommendations listed above to get your website running at full efficiency.

Request a consultation to start optimizing your site and growing your business with us today.