Site speed is really important for a positive user experience. Think about it, if you are waiting and waiting for a website to load, how long would you stick around for? Probably not that long. So, this is why you need to be on top of the speed of your site and constantly looking for ways to improve it.
The good news is that Google themselves have come out with some best SEO practices to ensure that your site speed is as optimised as possible. When looking at site speed the first place you should check is Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This will give you a score of how the mobile and desktop versions of your site are performing.
Some of the adjustments to improve speed can be quite simple and provide quick wins. However, others can be a lot more complex and technical. If you have a lot of technical issues with your site that is impacting speed, it is probably best to enlist the assistance of a professional who can help, a lot of SEO companies can also assist here.
So, have a read on below at some of the best tips for improving site speed:
Reduce Redirects
Redirects can put a real strain on your sites load time, so make sure you try to use as few redirects as possible. Your website will probably need to have redirects eventually, but make sure you have a think about whether each redirect is actually necessary.
Optimise Images
Images that are not properly optimised can hold a big weight and really slow down your website and business performance. You need to think about the file format, try to stick with PNGs for less quality images and for proper photographs go for JPEGs.
You also need to ensure that the image file size is not bigger then it needs to be. There are a lot of different tools out there that can help compress an image without impacting its quality.
Lazy Loading
You should also consider implementing lazy loading on your website for images, content, and videos. This means that the content on the page loads in stages and not all at once. If content is loading bit by bit as the user scrolls on the page, it means it can load faster.
This can be really beneficial for those pages with a lot of content on it. Also, if you have videos on your pages try to ensure that they don’t play automatically as this can create a lot of speed loading issues and really slow the site down.
Minify CSS and Other Codes
This is the code that makes your website look the way it does. Sometimes there is extra code in place that doesn’t really need to be there. Or there could be a simpler way of coding the same thing.
You may also find that over the years code has just been added and added to your site. When reviewing speed you’ll see that some of the code isn’t even used! This can certainly be a quick win if there is a lot of unused code included in your website.
Allow for Compression
Just like you would (and should) compress your images, you can also compress your CSS, HTML and JavaScript files. Some files can actually get pretty large, so take a look at your files and any that are over 150 bytes use a file compression software, the best and most used one is call Gzip.
Gzip is only really for CSS, HTML and JavaScript type files and it is best not to use this for the compression of images. As explained above, there are a number of different online tools (that are free!) that can help the compression of images.
Tina Johnson helped bring The Marketing Folks from a-weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. She continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a contributor to The Marketing Folks, Tara mainly covers industry new.
