If you really want your website to grow and get more and more traffic from search engines, you need to have a decent page loading speed. Technical SEO which was overlooked previously is now back in the fashion which aims at correcting the technical aspects of your website. Technical Seo is incomplete without optimizing your page speed.
Google or any other Search engines today check on relevancy but if the content of two web pages is similar, the Search engine will give priority to the website which will load faster.
For them, User experience is as important as relevancy. Also if you are promoting your website through paid ads on social media and the user is not able to see your page, it is all waste.
It is even worst when we spend our time on content and promoting it but the page is not loading quickly and visitors are finally quitting. This guide will be extremely beneficial for those who want to start a new blog or personal website so that they can take corrective action quickly.
Hence, lets us now discuss the ways to improve website speed.
10 ways to improve your website speed
These are the 10 crucial steps which will improve your page load speed and finally rankings too –
- Defer the Java-Script Loading
Java script takes time to load and is often render-blocking.
Use plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total cache to defer the Java Script. You can run the Pagespeed test on Google and will find that First Content Paint time has improved and overall page speed is now better than before.
- Choose a Good Web Hosting
Bloggers or website owners usually look for cheap web hosting options in the beginning. We always think that we will upgrade once we will get some traction in terms of traffic etc.
But slow web hosting will reduce the speed as the resources like Ram and CPU allocation is too low. You can check some of the best web hosting options at cheapandbesthosting.com and find the right fit for you.
If you have the budget, consider upgrading options like from shared hosting to VPS or VPS to a dedicated server.
- Use CDN (Free – Cloudflare / Paid – StackPath)
CDN is simple, stands for the content distribution networks. It is like hosting your websites on multiple servers. CDN reduces the load on your Hosting by creating several copies of your website on multiple servers spread across the geographies.
As in, you have a visitor of Canada, he will be served the content from the server nearest to Canada and the same process will be followed for all the users of India, or let’s say any other country.
It’s obvious that the Nearest server will reduce the lookup time and you will get faster speed. As per cheapandbesthosting.com, the Stack path is the cheapest and recommended CDN for beginners. Still, If you don’t have a budget, you can choose Cloudflare CDN. It’s free with a few basic options.
- Compress Images and Files
The higher file size will have a higher load time, this is pretty simple to understand. But what’s the way out? You can easily compress the files and images on the page. This will reduce the page size.
For this, Enable Gzip compression and your overall page size can be reduced through plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Fastest Cache.
Similarly- Images can be optimized by plugins like Smush it.
- Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching will instruct the browsers to store static files so that when the next time a particular page is opened, the browser will not have to download it from the server. It will quickly serve them from the cached copies it already has. This will drastically improve the page load time for repeat visitors.
Enable it through CDN or through plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, or any other cache plugins. A free Cloudflare plan will also offer this function.
- Image Lazy Loading
For every page that has images, please be very clear that it will take time in loading. In case you have 5-10 or even more images, it will take at least 10 seconds to load. While most of the population still on 3G, they will have to wait for 15-20 seconds to see your page.
With lazy loading, the page is loaded without images first, and after that as per the frame on screen, the image keeps on loading one by one.
In simple words, the image on the top of the page will load first, so on, and so forth. Consider using a good host suggested by cheapandbesthosting.com and optimize your page well by compressing files and reducing requests etc.
This will reduce the bounce rate and excellent user experience.
Jetpack and almost every cache plugin will give this feature for free.
- Reduce Useless plugins
Plugin in WordPress helps us to easily customize the pages and improve overall looks, security and these ways serve a lot of purposes. But higher the number of plugins slower will be the performance or speed.
It reduces the overall page delivery.
You should consider using only a limited number of plugins. Any plugin which is not in use or can be clubbed with one other plugin should be removed immediately.
- Reduce Number of Redirects
While redirects are important to eliminate 404 errors or when you have some outdated content and you want to redirect visitors to the updated one, still we at cheapandbesthosting.com we often suggest our visitors reduce the number.
Google suggests removing them as much as possible.
- Regularly check website speed
Make a habit of checking your speed regularly. You should use tools like Pingdom.com, GTMetrix.com, and periodically check website speed.
It’s obvious that your servers and pages will not perform the same always.
If the speed is fixed by you today for a particular page, you will notice some of your pages will not perform well after some time.
This is mainly due to various external factors like DNS and Web host performance.
- Minimize the number of Requests (HTTP)
Chrome browser or any other browser asks for various requests from your server which ultimately increases the page load time.
HTTP requests are always a load for the browser to process and server to deliver.
Without doing any other rocket science, simply by reducing the number of HTTP requests, you will see a significant improvement in the speed.
Conclusion
We have learned 10 easy and powerful ways which will improve your website speed drastically. As suggested by cheapandbesthosting.com, you should opt for a good web host with a low lag time. Also, ensure that every page when opens up quickly as it is a wow factor to your visitors.
A website with good speed always sees a growing number of Repeat visitors. If you have an affiliate website or eCommerce store, it is always good to work upon the same.
While it is an important ranking factor too, we must ensure simple ways mentioned above to ensure the same.
Not only on search results, even for paid traffic campaigns, but it is also a win-win situation for both visitors and for you to improve your page load speed. More and more visits and a low drop rate will ensure higher revenues.
Vishesh Gupta
Founder – CheapandBestHosting
(Entrepreneur, WEB Host Reviewer & Consultant)
