Attention ! Here’s the 2019’s Page Speed Optimization Guide to Watch Out for You
Posted by Pabitra Infotech on September 11th, 2019
Nearly a decade years ago Google has announced that the page speed of a website will be one of the critical factors which can help boost the search engine rankings. This implies that a slow page speed would mean search engines like Google, Bing, etc can crawl fewer pages which could negatively affect its indexation.
47% out of entire global consumers expect websites to load in one-to-two seconds and 40% will abandon a page that takes more seconds to load a site’s page. Regrettably, most of the websites clock in at an average speed of 8.66 seconds and stakes got higher when it comes to the mobile version.
Furthermore, a report conducted by HubSpot states that a drop in conversion is directly proportional to the amplification in page loading times. Even a single minute delay in page load time ensures roughly 20-30% drop in conversion rate. This concludes that slow speed page loading will kill conversions surely.
So, how to speed up the page load time? Let’s get started
In order to optimize your page speed:
• Integrate an optimized theme that doesn’t introduce much bloat
• You are on a host which is sufficiently fast. This helps your site visitors to access the website and interact with it easily (such as commenting or clicking your social media channels etc) whereas a slow host will push users to go away.
What Makes a Webpage?
It’s imperative to understand the elements of a webpage before putting effort on page speed optimization. So, what are the elements? See below
Important Elements of a Website
• HTML Code: Gives the page the structure it requires and content
• Static Files: used for functionality, interactivity, and design to the webpage
• Other Elements of Surprise: logo, background, content & graphics needed
The browser requests for each of these elements to render a website page. The number of HTTP requests thus plays an imperative role in page speed optimization.
How Does the Page of a Website Load?
A DNS request is generated whenever a user puts your website in the search bar of a browser. The search crawlers then points to your domain name provider and your server. Later the DOM then starts to load your HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The DOM would need to request for additional resources from your server. At this compilation stage, things may gets slower due to certain issues such as:
• Slow host
• Bulky images
• Site’s theme
• Apps, plug-ins, widgets
• Third-party script
• JavaScript
• Redirects
What Are the Page Speed Metrics to Know before Page Speed Optimization?
There are a number of page speed metrics to keep an eye on while opting for page speed optimization chores. Take a quick look at the most common and effective metrics used to optimize your site for better response below
Inclusion of Relevant Content
Addition to unique and relevant content is one of the most crucial metric to a site’s engagement. It’s the first stage of increasing the loading time process-wise. If the user finds webpage takes time to loading content, they simply abandon the site right there, which will increase the bounce rage actively.
Document Interactive Time
Documenting the time frame it takes to load the page completely will inform about the points at which the users start to interact with the website. This is highly correlated with the bounce rate and thus need due attention.
Size of the Web Page
Size of a web page refers to the total size in megabytes. This is an indirect page speed metric but carries an important role to look for during page speed optimization.
HTTP Requests
When a website’s page begins to load, it sends some HTTP requests to the server to download the relevant files. Due to this, there’s an unavoidable minimum page loading time similar to server’s response time. Reduce the number of HTTP requests and you can improve the page speed.
How Page Speed Affects SEO?
The most used search engine, Google, has already indicated that page speed is one of the crucial factors that influences the ranking of a page based on their algorithms. Research reveals that Google might specifically measure time to first byte has indicated site speed when considering page speed. In addition, a slow page speed may mean that search engines crawl lesser web pages using their allocated crawl budget; thus, negatively affecting the site’s indexation.
It must be understood that search engines are a business entity in themselves. If they start showing irrelevant or throw up results late eventually will lose. When someone is searching over Google for you, it is imperative that your web page shows up quickly and at the first page which is a part of SEO best practices.
Think about user experience then. When you Google, a site won’t you want it to show up fast and throw up relevant results so you would want to stay on it for long? On the other hand, if your website has a high bounce rate, it indicates to search engines that the result was irrelevant to users. And that your site is not up to the user’s expectations.
So, How Can You Increase the Page Speed?
As per the study reports, one second delay in page load time yields:
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 11% fewer page views
• 7% conversion loss
The bottom line is, a fast loading web page isn’t just important to rank the site with Google but also to improve the profit margin of your e-business. Here are some of the ways you can improve the page load speed.
? Minimize the HTTP requests to figure out how your website currently makes such requests and use it as a benchmark. An HTTP request is made for each of the elements of the on-page components of your site such as scripts, images, codes, etc. Simply reduce the number of elements on the page to speed up its loading time.
? You can minimize these files by minifying and combining them. This practice will not only modify the size of each file but also reduce the total number. Minifying a file will involve simply removing unnecessary whitespace, formatting and code while eliminating the extra line breaks, spaces and indentation. Additionally, if your site is running multiple JavaScript and CSS have them combined.
? There are two separate ways in which CSS and JavaScript load – synchronously and asynchronously. The latter can speed up your web pages because when a browser loads a page it will move from top to bottom. So, use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript to fasten page loading.
? Use a dedicated server to host your site. It will give you more space, and more control over your hosting. Though, it may require some hard work in terms of technical setup and configuration it still is a good bet. Moreover, a server of your own is better than a VPS and a Shared server as you won’t have to share resources such as disk space, CPU, RAM with other sites on the server. Hence, the load time of your webpage will be minimized.
? Leverage caching so you can shave off a significant amount of time of return visitors and offer a better user experience. Cached version of your site in a visitor’s browser will ensure that when a user returns it loads faster for them.
? To decrease load times for users who are physically away from your server use a CDN or Content Delivery Network. It will cache your site on a global network of servers. When a user’s browser will request files from your site that will be routed to the closest server.
Based on Google Webmaster Trends, what really is important is the load time of critical content as this is what your user is interested in. Hence, tweaking your server and content must be your priority.
For best results, it is suggested to use a combination of hands-on optimization along with caching and CDN. And now that we have identified the bottlenecks in your site’s page speed you can go about implementing them to unlock its potential.
About Author:
Arnav is the writer of Pabitra Infotech who has been the part of this web development company Bhubaneswar, Odisha for over the last five years. He is assigned to produce worthy marketing pieces and also guide other writers to create valuable stuffs. Apart, he is associated with many tech firms for producing worthy contents. For details visit: http://www.pabitrainfotech.com/.
