Slowly loading pages not only reduce the customer experience but become a reason for increased bounce rates, lower conversions, and a loss of revenue. Website page speed is now a search ranking factor as well.
If you are failing to have your pages optimized for speed, you will lose users, revenue, and organic ranking in Search Engine Results pages. An enterprise website needs a clear strategy when it comes to page speed optimization.
In case you’re already devoting time to track and monitor the website’s page speed, it’s perfectly fine. If you haven't yet planned the strategy, this is the right time to do so.
Page Speed Optimization & Implementation
There are several ways to address slow page speed issues and provide your users with the best experience possible. In this blog post, I’ll cover some very important and effective ways to improve page speed.
Leverage Browser Caching
By optimizing browser caching, you can improve page speed to a greater extent. As a user visits a website, static website assets like logos, styles, background, and images are download to the user’s hard drive. These assets are kept there for a predetermined time. The storage of such data consumes space, bandwidth, and memory.
This data is cached so that the information is made available time and again for the users without downloading it afresh whenever a user visits happen. It can dramatically improve the page speed and user experience. You can set browser cache to leverage caching in your favor.
Optimize Website Code
Your website’s source code impacts the site’s crawl ability. Crawability ensures that how easily Google bots can access and crawl your website content. Search engines, especially Google, rely on many factors to determine a site’s ranking – one of the most important is crawlability, or how easily it can access and crawl the content on your site. If your website is coded correctly, the crawling process goes faster and page speed improves.
Enterprize websites with thousands of pages and posts may have outdated and inefficient coding over time. As time goes on, such codes get piled up and make things even worse. Take time to audit your website code at least twice a year. It seems time-consuming but in long term, it can help you identify issues and address them properly.
Server-side Compression
A website page consists of several elements including content, images, videos, and other assets. When a user requests to open a page, these elements download automatically. Images or videos are generally heavy in size, thus, they slow down the server response time page loading speed. Compressing these elements is the one way to address this issue.
The process effectively compresses the size of these files so that they download faster on both server-side and user-end. Another noteworthy advantage of server-side compression is that it considerably cuts the upload time for HTML, CSS, and Javascript files that further leads to faster load times.
Use a Content Delivery Network
Content delivery networks, popularly known as CDNs or a kind of content distribution network. They manage the delivery of content elements such as style sheets, images, video, script, etc. from the server to the client. It speeds up the delivery of site content and drastically reduces load times and bandwidth consumption by content.
Use Lazy Loading for Images
The lazy load method is quite handy if the pages of a website have a lot of content to render. Generally, images on the website are loaded simultaneously. This leads to a longer waiting time for content to get delivered. On the contrary, the lazy loading method creates a priority for the content to be loaded. Based on this priority, content is delivered to the user. It helps users to see and interact with content faster.
Increase Server Response Time
Any of your efforts that reduce the server response time, help improve page speed. You can do plenty of things to increase the server response including using a CDN, monitoring the issues, and compressing images. By doing this, you can significantly improve the server response time and give users the experience they want.
Some pages like the home page or the product pages render the same for every user. Thus, using a static page cache on the server prevents the server from rendering all the page elements again while loading the page. This way you can significanty cuts the delay in server response time.
Optimize Theme and Plugin
The theme being used and the plugins installed on the website affect the page speed. Plugins are a great way to add functionalities to your website. Yet, their uncompatibility to the WordPress version or CMS being used can create significant page lag.
Avoid using outdated plugins or plugins installed from unknown sources. Use plugins and themes from reputed sources only. Moreover, make sure your website is running the latest version of it. While adding a new theme or plugin, monitor if they lead to page speed issues and bounce rates.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
