Improving Site Speed: Tools and Suggestions
Even if you have all the important information and amazing content to offer on your website, it can’t provide a great user experience if it opens slowly. Again and again, researches have proved that people don’t prefer slower sites and don’t engage with them. There is no better reason than this to keep the speed of your site as good as possible.
Along with users, there are also benefits of faster websites for search engines as they can easily process, crawl and index. So, your posts will show up quickly in search results and rank and perform well.
Best Tools for Site Speed
When analyzing a website’s SEO, you should always keep track of the speed of your site. Consider the tools you need to use and metrics you should follow. On the basis of environmental factors like time of the day and location, speed tests may vary. This is the reason you may not get the same results always with speed tools. The main reason behind different results is completely different metrics that they use. This is why we suggest multiple tools for testing your site speed. We recommend not relying on only one tool –
- GTMetrix
- WebPageTest
- Pingdom
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Google Lighthouse for Chrome
Keep in mind that these tools implement various approaches for making suggestions, reporting, and measurements. You should know different approaches they use to get the most of their results and find out how to interpret results at their best.
Tips to Speed up Your Site in 2020
There are plenty of factors affecting the page speed of your site. So, you need to take various steps to improve user experience and page load speed of your site. If results seem overwhelming, there is no need to worry. Read on to learn some of the important tips and best practices to improve site performance and reduce load times. There is no need to do them all day. Your site may be in line with best practices if you have already worked on improving your site speed.
- Minify files
Gzip and other tools are widely available to compress files. With these tools, you can compress CSS or HTML file size and reduce the overall response time of HTTP files. But don’t use it on images as it can affect the quality of images.
- Remove JavaScript which is blocking renders
Try to avoid using JavaScript that blocks renders when it comes to website structure, including scripts fetched before executing. Scripts can be used to prevent additional network requests when it comes to input scripts to render page content. The content must be smaller for quantity in terms of faster page speed. Make sure it executes faster for good overall performance. If you cannot render some scripts quickly, they must be deferred until the initial render finishes.
- Control redirects
You may face a lot of HTTP requests if you have plenty of redirects on your website. As a result, it affects page speed significantly. In addition, you should avoid fixing broken links which can drastically affect the experience of the user.
- Use browser caching
A website collects a cache which covers all the details about JavaScript, stylesheets and images every time when a user enters a site. It is important because a website doesn’t reload the whole page again and again whenever a user enters the same. It is helpful to improve page speed as it saves you from sending several HTTP requests to the server. In addition, it also saves bandwidth and overall hosting cost of a site.
- Get the most of CDNs
Content Distribution Networks or CDNs have a lot of networks and a copy of your website is created in each of them. It is one of the best things about CDNs. It provides more reliable and faster access to the site as data is stored in several data centers.
- Improve Response Time of the Server
There are plenty of factors affecting the response time of the server, including the traffic received by the website to the software used by the server as well as the hosting solution needed. You should target a maximum 200ms as a ballpark figure. Review various metrics of the performance and keep track of things like lack of memory, slow routing or slow requests on databases.
- Optimize all images
When it comes to adding images to your website, consider the right file format and size. If you have photographs, use JPEG format. If you have graphics with below 16 colors, use PNGs. Be sure to compress the images for online purposes. The image size across the website also affects the speed. If your website is heavy with images ,you can combine the images together with CSS Sprites in a few files. It can improve results and reduce latency in page speeds. It can cut down on the risk of delay or round trips.
- Cut Down on White Spaces
Text and HTML can accumulate if you have white space along with comment tags and lines. As a result, it extends the size of your page by around 20% and it adversely affects the load time of your website. So, it is best to review your pages and test each line of code to make the right changes needed to improve performance.
Review the progress and Improve Constantly
After taking some of the steps given above, keep a close look on the performance of your website to figure out the areas which need to be improved well. It is very vital to optimize site speed considering the current needs of web users. Whether you are running a small or large digital marketing company, you should get the most of the above tools and techniques to stay ahead of your peers.
