How To Optimize Website Page Load Speed – It’s not a new Discovery that Google rewards websites with better load speed, this means when other ranking factors have been considered and appears to be the same for different sites, the website that loads faster will rank higher than the others for that specific keyword. In addition to this, according to popular internet marketing expert Neil Patel, “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load”.
Considering the fact that over 40% of Internet users expect a website to load in two seconds or less (according to a survey by Google), it means that every millisecond is very important and you and could be the difference between getting an increased bounce rate or conversion rate. In this article, we’re going to show you five steps to improve your website load speed or page speed, so you don’t have to lose those conversions.
Top 3 Tips To Optimize Website Page Load speed.
Of course, there are a lot you can do to improve the load speed of your website, but in this article, we are going to look at five, and you don’t need to be a top-class web developer to implement tutorial.
1. Resizing Images
The size of images displayed on a web page is a very important factor in loading web pages. According to statistics found on httparchive.org, an average web page consist of over 50% images and contains about 1 MB of images.
This could seem huge, but we can’t remove all images on our site. However, what we can do is reducing the sizes of images so that we rank higher, and clients get to have a better browsing experience.
You can reduce the image file size by simply cropping your image to the size you need it to display, before uploading it to your site or webpage (if you’re using CMS)– when we upload images to our site and decide to maybe set the width parameters in the HTML script.
This will require your website to load the original image in its background before the script tells it to resize to the parameter you have defined, this takes a lot of time and considering every millisecond is important, it’s good practice to crop images first before uploading. Some people may advise using a plug-in called WP Smush on WordPress to automatically crop images on upload, but I won’t recommend this because if your website has a big header logo, it will crush it also and that would be solving a problem while creating another.
It is also important to save images with an appropriate file type. JPGs are the best file type for images because it doesn’t only reduce file size; it also makes it look like nothing was done to the image to reduce its size or quality. This type of compression is called Lossy Compression.
2. Using External Platforms To Host Large Files
Using external platforms for loading large files is a wise practice if you’re using a host with limited bandwidth. For example, let’s say you upload a video to your host’s server, and you want people to either stream or download said video, in cases where your hosting company doesn’t give access to unlimited bandwidth, multiple users will have trouble trying to get the video file the same time.
In cases of streaming there is going to be unnecessary pauses, and for downloads, your users are going to be able to download slower than normal even when they have a fast internet connection. You wouldn’t want your site’s visitors to experience this, especially if you want them to continue using your service.
Instead of choking up your bandwidth and rendering streaming, or download time that sucks to your users, it’s better if you host these files somewhere else, then embed a link to the file on your site.
For videos, I always recommend YouTube because it’s not only free, it can also help you reach a larger audience as people may access your videos directly from YouTube even before getting to know your site.
For other types of files, you can use Dropbox, ZippyShare, 4Shared, etc. They all have their pros and cons, but non of the cons in any result in the slow load speed of your website.
3. Using External CSS Only
A CSS script contains the style conditions for your page. It is always good practice to write an external CSS because an external CSS file will load before your page renders, unlike inline CSS, which loads rule by rule depending on when it’s written on the HTML document.
Generally, I always advise avoiding using inline CSS because it spoils your chances of getting a clean code and increases the size of your code by creating code duplication.
We should also note that having more than one external CSS file can reduce your page load time because browsers will have to send another HTTP request. To check how CSS in your site is set up, you can use the varvy.com CSS delivery tool.
To track your progress by testing your site speed before and after implementing these guidelines, you can use speed test tools like Gtmetrix or Pingdom. You simply just type in your URL, press enter, and the tool will run through your site and give feedback on your webpage load time.