Slow pages and Quick pages. Which one you prefer?
9 ways how to speed up your website and increase conversions
Matt Cuts from Google said that site speed is one of the factors influencing your site’s position in search engine results. And if your e-shop product page is not uploaded within 3 seconds, you lose 50% of visitors. You will lose 74% of visitors on your mobile if the page is not uploaded within 5 seconds. So now I scared you and we’re going to fix it.
How do I determine the speed of my site?
80-90% of page speed issues are in the page code or images. So, for the time being, please wait to optimize your database and address it.
And how do you find out what’s important?
Use these tools:
Very good tool from Google, including tips how to improve your website speed and loading times.
You get not only a score, but also a clear diagram of how individual elements are recorded using the so-called waterfall scheme.
This tool combines YSlow from Yahoo! and PageSpeed from Google. Everything in one place.
11 website speed optimization options
I have sorted the options according to how often the problem occurs and how easy it is to remove it. You’ll probably need a programmer for this.
1. Image optimization
Most of your site’s data is taken by images.
- Show the images in their original size.
- Don’t reduce it with html.
- Save images with compression of about 50-80%.
- For photos use jpg, for line art or “flat” gif colors, for pictures with transparency png.
- Discard metadata from images.
- Associate small pictures (icons) into one and use CSS positioning.
- Try using special PNG optimization tools, Compressor.io Use image uploading only when people load specific are of the website (lazy load)
You can reduce overall size of the images by about 20-80%.
2. Turn on compression (gzip, deflate)
As well as using zip for email files, you can use something similar on your web server. You can reduce the file size by up to 70%. In addition, adding one line in the htaccess file, so it takes you to make coffee for 5 minutes.
Make sure your server has gzip compression enabled.
3. Optimizing javascript (js) and cascading style sheets (css)
Cascading Style Sheets:
- discard unused code (use CSS Lint)
- group multiple css files into one
- for “bellow the fold” content, embed css directly into pages (Google recommendations).
Javascript:
- include js at the bottom of the page
- group multiple files into one
4. Reducing elements on the page (http requests)
The more elements you have on the website, the more often your browser communicate with the server, and later you will see the webpage.
So you can try:
- reduce the number of elements per page
- group the same elements in one (small images, css, js)
- have the same element externally and refer to it from anywhere
Likewise, it means some temperance, avoid unnecessary fun with javascript incl. libraries (jquery, mootools). Maximum 3 typefaces in Google fonts or use web-safe fonts (Arial, Helvetica). Use cookies only where it is really necessary, etc.
5. Enable Caching
Part of the content management system allows you to save the latest version of the site (WP Super Cache for WordPress) so it doesn’t have to be generated every time. This will show an already generated static page for dramatic page acceleration. Also try to set the so-called Expiry headers. This tells the browser what the lifetime of individual elements is and when to download them again.
6. (CDN) content delivery network
Browser downloads files one at a time. But if you put them on another domain, they download in parallel. The files are also downloaded from the server closest to the user, so the upload is further accelerated.
7. Clean and minify page code
This means, for example, that instead of using the image buttons, you use the css buttons to throw away unused code, incl. comments and the resulting code is minified.
8. Avoid Redirecting
Sometimes you have a page on the website that has moved. Then you have to tell the visitors (and the search engine) where they moved to different location. 301 redirects are used for this. However, each redirect slows the target page upload. So please avoid it.
9. Faster hosting
Sometimes your website performance is caused by “not so good” hosing company. Some of them can throttle resources dedicated to your hosting program just because many others clients are using the same server. Choose proven companies which have updated hardware and easy scaling options.
Conclusion
Perhaps I convinced you that the site’s speed is important.
However, content is also important. If you do not convince the site visitor to interact with your website, you can have the fastest pages in the world and it will not be much helpful.
Tags: Optimization, SEO, Speed
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