Website Speed Optimization – How To Improve Page Speed?

If your site is not speed-optimized, you will lose users, money, and organic ranking in search engine results.

In order to optimize page performance, a marketing or other website needs a clear strategy.

In that case, there are a lot of approaches to fix the issue of poor page performance and provide your consumers with the greatest experience.

Here you can throw several significant and efficient strategies to increase page performance with the best practices.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Load times suffer when all the data necessary to load your site fully is kept in the same place. In this situation, CDN helps to reach your website content to the user before loading completely

The content is replicated across multiple servers using multiple servers. To optimize content delivery, the CDN selects the server (or servers) closest to your users’ physical location.

Google advisor John Mueller said earlier there is no effect on SEO while using CDN. Still, website loading speed increases in that particular location if it has CDN.

Choose the SEO Hosting Plan:

Almost everyone starts out as a beginner at some time, and one of your first tasks will be to pick a web hosting provider.

Hosting is where the complete data of your website is stored. It has a huge role in website loading speed.

SEO-friendly hosting helps keep initial response time and total blocking time under control. In return, it helps LCP (largest contentful paint) in under 2.5 seconds.

You should remember to check whether your hosting provider avails of the following features.

• Dedicated Cloud Server
• Minimum 99.99% server uptime
• High security
• Data Centre at your target audience location
• Regular Backups
• 24/7 Technical support

We use Cloudways for our website as hosting, and we have a mobile loading speed of less than 2.5 seconds, passing Core Web Vitals.

Migrate to a CMS:

Migration to a Content Management System (CMS) is the better website development option.

CMS like WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow have pre-codes and builders optimized for SEO performance.

Still, it has various plugins that have functionalities like the following:

• Compressing Images or converting to webp format
• Reducing unused CSS and JavaScript
• Minifying and Combining CSS and Java Scripts
• Lazy Load
• Clear Cache
• Preload, etc.

Use Lightweight theme in CMS:

Lightweight themes play an important role in website speed optimization and SEO.

Lightweight themes Astra, Neve and GeneratePress that we recommend using. They have very small file sizes and HTTP requests.

• Astra – 44 KB size and 9 HTTP requests
• GeneratePress – 26 KB and 7 HTTP requests
• Neve – 32 KB and 8 HTTP requests

Bulky website file size and higher HTTP requests can directly impact the website loading speed and core web vitals.

A theme is the heart of your website. As a result, it affects the website, which has unwanted designs, content, videos, and images.

This decides how fast it loads for users, which search engines consider when ranking your site.

Reduce the Number of Plugins

WordPress plugin quality is the most important. Your site may still have issues if you have several plugins loaded.

The best WordPress plugins are those that receive regular updates and have outstanding developer support.

Having a minimum number of excellent WordPress plugins is better than having many poor ones. The only thing is to update your plugins regularly. 

Remove all the plugins that are of no use, and be wise to keep a single plugin for the same function on the website.

At the same time, if you require a plugin only for a particular time, remove it once its usage is exhausted. For example, using a Duplicate plugin once all the web pages are created.

Minify JavaScript and CSS files

In JavaScript, minification is the process of removing any unnecessary characters from the original code.

Any information from the source code that is not required for JavaScript to function is removed, resulting in a smaller version of JavaScript.

The CSS file should be compressed, and unnecessary characters should be removed to speed up website loading.

The minified web page version is given when a user requests it instead of the full version, leading to quicker response times and less expensive bandwidth use.

Minify JavaScript and CSS Files, so it compresses the bulky codes in the website and reduces the website size.

Reduce Unused JavaScript and CSS

Things are straightforward when it comes to unnecessary JavaScript and CSS. The more useless code your website includes, so why it take longer to load a website? No one wants to have a bad site experience and unused Javascript.

There are two types of render-blocking Javascript:

• Non-critical JavaScript
• Dead JavaScript

Implement Gzip Compression

GZIP is a compression method widely used to efficiently deliver data over the internet. “GZIP” refers to a compression technique and software used to do such compression, and the file extension usually indicates the file format that is produced by GZIP compression .gz.

In the WordPress control panel, you could even enable gzip:

• Click the /wp-admin/options.php page.
• You may look for the gzip compression option by using the search feature of your browser.
• By keeping the setting from 0 to 1, you can enable gzip compression in WordPress.

Detect 404 errors

When you click on a link, an error message appears instead of taking you to the website you hope to see.

Something resembling the screen “404 Not Found.” The common HTTP status code is 404.

You can access your Google search console account to view the whole list of 404 sites.

• Click on the Google search console’s dashboard for your website.
• Select Pages from the Index menu.
• You will notice ” Not Found (404)” under “Why pages aren’t indexed”.

Reduce redirects

Redirects are a way to drive visitors from one URL to another. There are various techniques to redirect, but each one slows down the page’s loading time.

Redirects are essential to SEO, so it’s important to know the various types when to use each, and how they relate to one another.

Make Mobile Friendly

An additional choice that can enhance or play as a stand-alone solution is a specific mobile app (for iOS and Android users).

It is best to ensure that not all businesses require an app. Here there are four measures to make your website mobile-friendly in Google’s views and users for the year 2023.

• Enhance mobile user loading times.
• Let Google index everything.
• Improve the UI and UX of your mobile website.
• Make use of Schema markup.

You should know how to make a website mobile-friendly to optimize page speed and to dominate search engines.

Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests

HTTP requests are not unhealthy to the concept, as every request delays the web page’s loading.

Every file and code makes an HTTP request when accessing. So, you need to keep your website with lightweight resources.

In general, you should aim to have as few as possible without affecting the user experience or functioning of the website.

Compress all Images & Use Lazy Load:

Images that enhance the look, usability, and accessibility of your website can help you build your brand. With image optimization, you can increase user engagement and visitor traffic.

By making the effort to implement image guiding principles, you can also ensure that every time a visitor to your website connects your brand with quality.

Try to compress the image, and keep them under 100 kb. Always upload the images in new generation formats like WebP.

Reduce DOM Size

If you have an excessive number of DOM nodes (or HTML components) on your page, or if you layer them too deeply, your DOM will become too large.

The user’s browser uses more. As a result, it runs your website, which causes a slow page load time and poor page performance scores.

Simply said, you can improve site speed and user experience by lowering the DOM size. This will lead to an increase in your Core Web Vitals rating.

Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

It is known as a render-blocking resource when a browser cannot render the processed data due to a script or link.

The actual render-blocking resources are the script tag and style tag. Fortunately, working with script and CSS files is simple, and there are three ways to eliminate rendering blocking resources.

• Remove Unused Code
• Defer loading 
• Inline the code
• Delay JavaScript execution
• Combine JavaScript files

Use Website Caching

The process of storing data for later use, such as a duplicate of a web page delivered by a web server, is known as web caching.

When the first time a user accesses the page, it is cached or stored, and the second time a user requests the same page, a cache will provide the copy, maintaining the origin server’s integrity.

Clearing the website cache periodically helps in better website speed optimization.

Use Video Formats for Animated Content:

A picture with several frames, or images, that convey animation is referred to as “animated content.”

Therefore, animated content can have very large file sizes, resulting in a slower page load time and high data use.

It doesn’t appear every day, but when it does, it is usually related to advertisements.

Uses passive listeners to improve scrolling performance

Include the flag if you support browsers with passive event listener support.

When the event listener has the passive: true flag, the browser is instructed to let the page scroll right away rather than waiting for the script containing the event listener to complete execution.

Minimize third-party usage

Third-party scripts are defined as scripts that are hosted on a domain other than the URL, such as cdn.mysite.com; it will still be considered a third-party script.

As the page loads, Lighthouse calculates how long each external script will block the main thread.

Add Expires Header:

You can add expired headers to the .htaccess file of your site to speed up load times for return visitors.

Using this type of HTTP header, the browser can determine whether to request site resources from the server or cached copies, depending on how soon cached copies will expire.

There are two reasons why expired headers are important. 

• They reduce server load and loading time.
• Keeping outdated resources from being served to your visitors.