How to Optimize Your Website for Load Speed and Performance?
Prior to “how” you may be wondering about “why” I should care about my website’s load speed and performance?
The answer is straightforward:
Faster websites convert better, users love speedy sites, and so do search engines, including Google!
“A website’s load speed is one of Google’s main ranking factors. Having a quick load speed will reduce conversion abandon rate, as users are likely to remain on your website for longer periods.”
Not yet sure if you “need” to optimize your site? Check out the following stats below to find out how much revenue you are leaving on the table!
Both of the above images belong to unbounce.com
Now that we’ve established the importance of a fast loading website, how the speed of a website affects overall performance, and fast website speed increases revenue, let's take a look at how to test your website speed.
When scanning your website, tools are measuring many items, but most importantly the following:
Performance Grade
PageSpeed Score
Page Size
Load Time
Number of Requests
There are quite a few tools available; however, we use and recommend the following three:
Pingdom
GTmetrix
Google’s PageSpeed Insights (Only tool for Mobile)
Performing site speed audits and repairing site speed issues is not a one and done task. It is crucial to consistently test your website and continually make the recommended changes as doing so will ensure your website is running at optimum speed and performance.
Listed below are essential optimization tasks that should be attended to in order to achieve optimum site speed and performance:
Serve images in next-gen formats
Optimize Images
Remove Unused CSS
Remove Duplicate JavaScript and CSS
Minify HTML
Compress components with gzip
Minify JavaScript
Minify CSS
Leverage Browser Caching
Minimize Redirects
Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
A major consideration when it comes to site speed is choosing a Fast Response Hosting Provider:
Hosting providers have one of the largest impacts on overall site speed and significant effect on website load times and subsequent performance. Rave Digital highly recommends WPengine, HostGator, and Inmotion hosting to avoid the pitfalls of subpar providers.
The next step is to proceed according to your website platform’s core requirements and functionalities. If your store is on the Magento platform then using extensions or hiring a team of certified Magento developers who will continually optimize and maintain your Magento store or website to improve website load speed times and performance. In terms of alternate platforms such as Drupal, WordPress (WP), Joomla, .Net websites; Modules, plugins, or extensions can be implemented in order to achieve optimum website performance.
Rave Digital has extensive WordPress web development experience and great success in improving WordPress website load speed. One of the most beneficial aspects of WordPress is the enormous development community and access to endless amounts of plugins! Listed below are several plugins Rave Digital recommends to increase Wordpress site speeds and boost site performance:
WP Rocket - One of the best all-in-one plugins to increase Wordpress website speed. It includes features like Page Caching, GZIP Compression, Browser Caching, Database Optimization, Google Fonts Optimization, Lazyload, Minification/Concatenation, Defer JS Loading, and many others.
In the event this plugin or some of the functionalities are not supported by your website, you can use alternate plugins for different optimization, see below:
W3 Total Cache - W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
WP Fastest Cache - When a large amount of traffic visits a site, the system uses a lot of RAM and CPU, therefore, pages are rendered slowly. In this case, you want to avoid a cache system that continually renders pages. WP Fastest Cache generates static HTML files, saving them and serving static HTML pages to visitors greatly reducing what would otherwise be extremely slow load times!
Imagify - Speed up your website with this image optimizer and get lighter images without losing quality.
Shortpixel - A freemium easy to use, comprehensive, stable, and frequently updated image compression plugin, optimizing any image or PDF document on your website.
In the event of compatibility issues, you can research alternative WP plugins for each of the website speed issues at WP plugins.
Stay tuned for more web development and website improvement articles!
Source: LinkedIn