Search engines take account of various factors while ranking websites on SERPs. A key factor that decides this ranking is page loading speed. Faster page loading speed not only increases the chances of a web page getting ranked higher on SERPs but also helps you enhance the user experience (UX) offered by your website. It is also related to the bounce rate on your website.
If a page of your website takes 10 seconds or above to load completely, the visitor is 120% more likely to leave your website. Google and other search engines take bounce rate seriously and consider it a compromise on the user experience. This consideration may lead to lower rankings for your website. Hence, affecting the SEO of your website significantly. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure an excellent page loading speed.
According to recent research, it was discovered that websites offering a page loading speed of around 1.56 seconds are ranked on the top of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Hence, if you want to drive a higher chunk of organic traffic to your website and make more conversions, an excellent page loading speed will matter a lot. Therefore, we have put together some practical tips to help you increase the page loading speed to help you in this regard. Further details are given below:
Optimize and Compress Image Files
Uploading an image with the wrong dimensions will make the HTML code take some time to modify its dimensions, thus, adding to the page loading time. Similarly, an image with a larger file size will take significant time to load and affect the page loading speed. Therefore, image compression is also necessary. You can compress image files in bulk using an image compressor. You have to upload image files to the tool and compress them one by one or in batches to make them suitable for web upload. By doing so, website loading speed can be improved.
Opt for Efficient Hosting
If you want the pages of your website to load fast, don’t fall prey to cheap hosting that offers poor performance. Some website owners fall for poor hosting services to save a few bucks, leading to bad website performance in terms of page loading speed. In addition, such hosting services often provide you with shared hosting, which ultimately translates to a longer page loading time. The best way to avoid such an issue is to opt for performance-optimized hosting services.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Another prominent factor that adds to the page loading time is the extended number of HTTP requests a browser has to make to load multiple files present in the page’s code. The browser processes these requests one by one, which means the larger the number of files on your page, the longer your visitors will have to wait to see the content of your page. However, you can enhance the page loading speed of individual pages of your website by reducing the number of HTTP requests. You can check out the number of requests made by a particular page of your website and the time required to process that request using the browser’s developer tools. Once you get to know the number of requests, make sure you don’t have any unnecessary files uploaded to the page. If you find any file, immediately remove it.
Ensure Asynchronous Loading of CSS and JavaScript Files
The layout of your website is generally made up of CSS and JavaScript files. HTML code only provides the basic structure of your website and loads CSS and JavaScript files to provide the layout and appearance. There are two methods to load CCS and JS scripts for a webpage: Synchronous and Asynchronous. Synchronous loading means the one-by-one loading of files. On the other hand, asynchronous loading means loading all the files in one go. However, the heavier JS scripts are deferred to load after the loading of all CSS scripts. This method allows the pages of your website to load faster. You can do this by eliminating render-blocking resources from the code. Additionally, CMS plugins are also available for this purpose.
Streamline Your Code
Another effective way to master excellent page loading speed is streamlining your code. By streamlining, we don’t mean the HTML code only; you also need to go through the CSS and JS scripts for this purpose. Make sure there is nothing unnecessary left in the script. Make sure there are no extra spaces, comments, unneeded elements, and inactive code blocks that add to the size of HTML, CSS, and JS script files. Doing so will allow you to minimize these codes and keep the code clean, which ultimately helps you load pages faster.
End Note!
An excellent page speed is the need of the hour these days. However, you can’t expect your website to offer exceptional performance if it receives a higher bounce rate because of a slower page loading speed. We have discussed some practical ways to help you enhance the page loading speed. Hopefully, it will help you a lot in making your website faster.
