Website speed optimization. How to do it in 2020?

What is website speed optimization?

The term website speed optimization essentially refers to the time length at which web sites or media content is downloaded from website hosting servers and displayed onto the requesting web browser. Page load time is the time duration between clicking the link and displaying the entire content on the requesting browser from the web page.

We live in a fast-moving world. People want everything as quickly as possible. They seem to be unhappy when something takes too long. Website speed optimization takes away one barrier between you and your websites. You might have closed out the browser tab or felt less inclined to patronize the website once it loaded. Google understands that consumers want fast access to products, information, and services.

The Website speed refers to how fast your web page loads when someone clicks on a link or manually types in the URL that directs them to your web page. Website speed optimization can put you ahead of your competitor websites, which will improve your Google rankings. 

If your website loads in three seconds and your competitor’s web page loads in nine seconds, Google wants to serve up your content first. If you have a slow website, you need to systematically consider potential experts and resolve them, so your visitors have a more enjoyable and useful user experience.

Benefits of page speed optimization:

The faster your website speed for loading, the lower the bounce rate in Google. If your web page is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow websites that drive high bounce rates. The main reason to speed up a website is to improve the user’s experience. Most web page owners make a great effort to engage users through their content and graphics, but the first impression is their website loading time. E-commerce success is highly dependent on delivering a good user experience through fast page speed optimization, especially on mobile devices for conversion and revenue. Google's main goal is to satisfy user's needs, so it penalizes with lower speed loading sites that fail to offer value to their visitors.

Five ways to optimize page load speed:

Web page speed optimization decides whether a user to your site will explore further or part their ways. More than 83% of visitors expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less and more than 40% of visitors abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

In addition to losing out on page views and traffic, your ROI and conversions also go for a toss if the page doesn’t provide well. A slower site load time also hampers the Search Engine Optimization, User experience and brand image of your business industry. Website speed optimization is an important factor that Google uses to determine search rankings, both on mobile and desktop. According to Google, website speed optimization is a key element of your landing page experience and has a great impact on your AdWord Quality Score.

As per statistics, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that even a minute seconds delay in the page load time results in the loss of substantial traffic and potential sales. And this loss is amplified several times over if don’t you have not been concerned about your mobile site’s speed. Faster page load time not only makes your users happy, but it also decreases your bounce rate and improves your conversions manifold.

From your point of view and a search point of view, take a variety of these metrics together to figure out how you should see the site with regards to speed. With all of this in mind, five tips to help you the Google gods with your website speed optimization.

• Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP):

  Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is out and has been speculated to have two benefits to optimize web page speed. One is it will have a Fast label designation on search engine results sites, and the second one is that it will be a ranking factor. The aim for AMP is for publishers to be able to load their web pages quickly on mobile since mobile responsive could be slow and clunky because desktop resources are heavy and plenty. It is best to optimize the experience of mobile browsing for all visitors by standardizing a mobile version of your page with AMP.

• Minimize redirects:

  Redirects are instructions that automatically take website users from one page to another location. Each redirect takes up valuable milliseconds, creating a slower page load speed. This is especially problematic on mobile phone devices because they often depend on less reliable networks than desktop or laptop users. Webpage redirects create additional HTTP requests which negatively impact the performance of the site. You should keep them to a minimum or eliminate them. By running a site scan, you should identify all redirects on your page. Then you must check if they serve an exact purpose and leave only the needed ones.

• Use a content delivery network (CDN):

  A content delivery network is a set of web servers distributed across different geographical locations that provide web content to visitors about their location. Your website’s speed is greatly affected by where the visitor’s location is, relative to your web server. When you host the website on a single server, all end-users requests are sent to the same hardware. For this reason, the time needed to validate each request increases. The load time increases when users are physically far from the main server. With the help of CDN, end-user requests are redirected to the nearest server. As a result, the content is delivered to the end-user quicker and a web page works faster. This process is expensive, but a quite effective way to website speed optimization.

• Prioritize lazy loading:

  High-resolution images can slow down the loading time for your webpage, as well as increasing memory and page weight. You must cut them from your page entirely, but you should want to keep them in. Lazy loading is a way of speeding up website load time without having to get rid of your resource-heavy content. With lazy loading, only part of the website is loaded at a time, the particular section that the viewer is looking at that second, so you will put offloading the next section until the user scrolls down to it. Lazy loading is a must if you have implemented infinite scrolling, which is most popular with content-heavy sites, but it can help on all types of web pages.

• Cut down on plugins:

  If you have a site that runs on WordPress or a similar other platforms that relies on plugins for extra functionality, those plugins could be reducing the speeds of your site, affecting its interactivity metrics and dragging down your website speed optimization. Some plugins might be necessary for your site, like your online payment processor, but others may not serve many purposes anymore. Many plugins query third-party servers for information, which might further slow down the speed of the web page. Extra plugins can lead to database bloat, making it much slower to load, gratuitously expanding the weight of your site, so the fewer you have, the better the website speed optimization.

Conclusion:

A typical end-user expects web sites to load in less than 3 seconds. If you don’t meet this barrier, you may lose a lot of website traffic and, as a result, your revenue reduces. So, by applying a simple yet effective website speed optimization approach, you can improve your business to the next level. You should check and evaluate the key factors of considering conversion, website success, visibility, and usability. You may test your current website speed and prioritize the web pages and features that need attention concerning these three factors.

You have to implement accelerated mobile pages to load the web pages quickly on mobile without any delay. You should minimize redirects to avoid wasting your valuable time. You have to use a content delivery network to deliver the content to the end-user quicker irrespective of their location. You must prioritize lazy loading to speed up website load time in spite of resource-heavy content. You should cut down plugins to avoid unnecessary actions that slow down the page speed.

Contact a highly skilled web development team that has created a fast, proven, and cost-effective process for completing site speed optimizations for the brands they partner with. We handle the entire process of optimization from A to Z and eliminate unnecessary elements on your site that could be slowing down your website load time. The highest converting websites with the best end-user experience fall between the A and B range. With the best website speed process partner, all the clients may move into A and B. The process that expert web development team has developed has been proven to get amazing results for brands all over the world and takes your business to the highest range.