How Can I Increase My Website Speed?

Effective Ways To Increase Website Speed

If you're a new website owner, website speed may not be a concern right now, but after everything is in order, you'll be wondering how to increase the performance of your site. Visitors are more likely to abandon a website with a slow loading speed.

Having a quick-loading website is important for both user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO). In today's world, most people are impatient, and they want a website to load quickly. If your site's speed is slow, expect unfavorable feedback. According to Google, one of the signals utilized by its algorithm to rank pages is site load speed.

Websites have become significantly more complicated and content-heavy in recent years. As a result, make sure your website is optimized to reduce page load time. We all know that a website's load speed has a negative impact on your business, which is why understanding the cause of your website's slowdown is necessary.

What is Page Speed?

It determines how quickly the content on your page loads. The term "page speed" is frequently confused with "site speed," which refers to the page speed for a random sample of page views on a website. 

There are a few major strategies to increase the speed of your page.

Optimize Images and Video

Images and videos are one of the major contributors to your website's load time. The significant portions of a page's overall size are these and it is influenced by two factors: the size of each individual asset and the overall amount of assets loaded on any given page. It is critical to act quickly in response to these variables.

All media assets' file sizes should be reduced:

• Size your images appropriately - Some people make the mistake of submitting 12mp photos without first downsizing them. Uploading a 6000-pixel wide image to be presented at 500 pixels is not a good idea. While retina considerations (2x) are important, make sure the photographs are sized according to the design requirements.
• Stick to JPEG - JPG is a compressed picture format that keeps the image's integrity while wasting no space. As a result, JPG is favored for the great majority of applications. PNG should only be used when transparency is required. TIFF and BMP should be avoided at all costs.
• All photos should be compressed - Even photos that have been suitably scaled will result in bigger files than necessary. Make sure that all of your images are compressed, as the compression can considerably reduce file size without affecting image quality. On the most basic level, you can export from Photoshop (or another image editor) by selecting "save for web." We like Imagify a lot because of how well it integrates with WordPress. You can also utilize picture compressing programs that are available online.
• All videos should be compressed - High definition video, in particular, has the capacity to be a serious speed killer. Use a video compression program, such as Handbrake, to minimize each video.
• Use a third-party video hosting platform to embed - To lessen the burden on your hosting server's traffic, embed video utilizing a 3rd-party video hosting site such as Vimeo or Wistia.

Remember that the more graphics and videos you include on each webpage, the longer it will take to load. It's critical to consider the total "size" of each page's assets. Sliders (or carousels), background videos, huge photos, and background textures may add interest to a website, but they also slow down page load time. Strive for a healthy mix between visual aesthetics and user experience.

Use a caching and page speed plugin

We are aware that a variety of factors influence websites to load pages. However, there are a plethora of useful plugins and modules available to aid you with technical heavy lifting. Website caching is one method for reducing the time it takes for your page to load. Cached pages are HTML versions of specific pages that are used to avoid time-consuming requests to the website's database. A cached page loads substantially faster while reducing server strain by up to 80%.

WordPress users can quickly install one of the many popular pages caching plugins, such as W3 Total Cache. But, WP Rocket, a powerful page speed solution for WordPress websites, can not only handle page caching (reducing the requirement for a plugin like W3 Total Cache), but also a myriad of other page-speed optimization approaches such as: 

• Enabling browser caching
• LayLoading images and video
• Minifying resources(HTML, CSS,JS)
• Optimizing the database
• Loading CSS files asynchronously
• Loading JS files deferred 

Upgrade your web hosting service

The quality of your website hosting plan, whether positive or poor, is largely influenced by the load page of your website. Especially for larger, more resource-intensive websites and those with a high volume of visitors. While using a low-cost shared hosting platform may be appealing, investing in a high-performance VPS, managed, or dedicated web hosting platform should be your top consideration.

These packages frequently include faster technological stacks, dedicated resources, and a slew of crucial options for fine-tuning your server.

Here are some more suggestions to help your website load faster

We recently discussed the aspects that may influence the page load speed of your website. Some of this is under your control, but most of it necessitates the expertise and knowledge of a web developer.

Here are a few more things to think about if you want to improve the speed of your website's page loading:

• Minimize HTTP requests - This delves into the subtleties of web development, but reducing the total number of parts of the homepage that needs to be loaded like graphics, scripts, and etc., helps minimize page load time. 
• Enable Gzip Compression - Before transmitting your webpages and style sheets to the browser, Gzip compresses them. This reduces page size by up to 70%, which can also significantly cut transmission time.
• Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) - By hosting website files across a broad network of computers throughout the world, a CDN can increase site speed. This allows users to download data from nearby servers, and sharing the bandwidth reduces page load time.
• Configuring server settings - Out-of-the-box server software (such as Apache) is not usually appropriately configured for maximum website performance. Consult your hosting provider for advice on how to "performance tune" your server for your website and content management system (CMS).

Knowing these techniques to improve your website's load page may be ideal to gradually catch up with new trends and catch up with Google's algorithms. A faster-loading site attracts more visitors than a slower-loading one. Invest in reputable web developers and hosting packages, and always keep your website maintained and updated as needed.