Tips to Optimize Website Speed

Website Speed Optimization: 3 Tips to Improve Performance

Why all the talk about website speed? There are several reasons for that. First, user experience. No one wants to wait several minutes until the web content appears on the screen. Second, as load time impacts the desire of visitors to stay on the page, poor website performance can deter them from exploring and purchasing more goods. And third, Google and other search engines prioritize fast-loading sites in their rankings.

So, slow websites can be buried under faster competitors, missing out on revenue. Studies show that a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. That’s significant.

How can you increase your website’s average page load time? In this article, we’ll share actionable tips to enhance your website’s performance. Some steps don’t require extensive technical knowledge but have a significant impact on page speed.

Even if you leverage an intuitive platform and website builder, you can benefit from optimization. As such, let’s dive into website speed optimization together, starting from understanding the basics and moving on to advanced techniques.

Understanding Website Performance Optimization

Website performance improvement involves techniques and practices to enhance page load times and overall performance. Faster websites not only provide a better user experience but also improve search engine rankings, keep visitors engaged, reduce bounce rates, and boost conversions.

At first glance, you may not notice that your website requires optimization. That’s where you need to employ dedicated tools and analyze key metrics for measuring speed:

• Time to first byte (TTFB): How long it takes for the server to respond to a user’s request and deliver the needed content. The lower this metric is, the better your web servers operate.
• Full page load time: The total time it takes for web pages to fully load, including all elements like images, scripts, and stylesheets. An essential component of end-user website speed testing is tracking the amount of time it takes to render the entire page onto requesting browsers.
• First Contentful Paint (FCP): Gauges how quickly the first piece of content appears to load. It’s the interval of time between when a web page begins to load and when the first element—text, picture, etc.—unfolds on the device’s screen.

As for monitoring tools, consider the following solutions to carry out a speed test and identify performance bottlenecks:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: A free tool for evaluating website performance on desktop and mobile devices. It provides both lab and field data garnered from real user interactions. It gives a score and actionable insights on how to fix slow page speed. It shows Core Web Vitals metrics (Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) that replaced First Input Delay (FID)).
• GTmetrix: Provides a detailed report on performance metrics. It includes a breakdown of load times, page sizes, and requests. You can also see recommendations for improvement. It’s comprehensive, helping you identify issues that negatively impact performance.
• WebPageTest: A lab tool that analyzes site speed in ideal conditions, like on specific dedicated servers or with a good network connection. It’s versatile, providing insights into how desktop and mobile internet users experience your site.

Three Crucial Website Speed Optimization Tips

Ready to enhance your website? For starters, you need to know what exactly calls for optimization. Is it a hosting solution? Or maybe your website is overloaded with excessive code. To answer these questions, audit your website first.

To speed up the task, consider ordering page speed optimization services so that developers check your pages and enhance their loading speed. In this section, we’ll overview some essential website performance tuning and speed optimization steps.

1. Choosing the Right Hosting Provider

One possible cause of speed issues could be your hosting provider. The provider’s location, physical infrastructure, and the total capacity of their online connectivity are some of the key factors that could lead to slow page load times, but the type of web hosting currently used for your website can also affect the speed. The first step when optimizing your web presence should be evaluating hosting services.

Website owners can choose one of the following options:

• Shared hosting is the most cost-effective option, and it works best for individuals and small businesses. Shared hosting splits resources among multiple websites, so you need to take into account that you may experience major slowdowns, especially during traffic spikes.
• Hosting on a virtual private server (VPS) is an intermediate platform between dedicated and shared hosting. It segments a physical server into multiple virtual servers. Each site gets its own resources, which is a step up from shared hosting. But beware: high resource loads can still cause slow page speeds.
• Dedicated hosting is the premium option, and it means you’re not sharing resources with anyone else. It’s the best choice for high-traffic websites. Although more expensive, dedicated hosting ensures consistent high performance, regardless of user requests or traffic spikes.

Apart from these types of hosting, you can also opt for managed hosting. It’s an additional service layer and entails taking care of the technical management of your server by the provider, including:

• performance enhancement through gzip compression, image compression, and code minification;
• integrating with a content delivery network (CDN);
• cache optimization (server-side caching and browser cache configurations);
• regular updates and maintenance;
• scalability to grow from a small online business to an enterprise.

Thus, you can focus on content and growth. To understand how your site performs under current hosting conditions and whether it’s time to change your service, utilize tools like GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights.

2. Leveraging Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

The next optimization strategy revolves around the way you store data required to load a site entirely. If it’s in one place, initial and ongoing load times can suffer. How? Let’s assume visitors access your website from any part of the globe. They have to load the content from a particular server. And it may be located far from them. This adds up to waiting times, as the data has to travel a long distance.

The solution is to switch to CDNs. They distribute content across multiple servers globally and choose the server closest to the user’s physical location. As such, visitors from New York and Tokyo will experience decent loading times. Among the benefits of CDNs are as follows:

• reduced latency (extremely useful for mobile users);
• faster loading of static files such as CSS, JavaScript, images, and web fonts.
• enhanced website usability;
• high-performance websites;
• improved Core Web Vitals.

Such an approach to storing content gains traction among website owners, so different CDN providers emerge. Among the top names are Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, and others. Each offers varying features and benefits, such as robust security, easy integration with content management systems (CMS) and external tools, and extensive global coverage. To measure the impact of a CDN on your site, use tools like Sematext Experience and conduct speed tests.

3. Optimizing Images for Faster Loading

For most websites, images are indispensable. They add engagement, make the content more memorable, and liven up walls of text. After all, how do you imagine purchasing goods without even seeing their photos? It’s impossible.

Yet, images, especially high-resolution ones, can make pages load slowly. That’s where you need to optimize images, namely:

• Compress image files without losing quality with tools like TinyPNG and ImageOptim. These tools remove unnecessary data from the files, making them smaller and quicker to load. Different formats can be compressed to varying degrees. For example, an advisable compression level for JPEGs is 60-70%.
• Pick the right format (JPEG, PNG, SVG, or WebP). JPEG is the best format for pictures and graphics with lots of colors. PNG is larger than JPEG and is best for images that require transparency or high quality, such as logos and icons. WebP is smaller than PNG and supports superior compression, both lossless and lossy. SVGs are vector images that are usually smaller and load faster than PNGs or JPEGs. They work perfectly for icons, logos, and other visual components.
• Utilize responsive images for different devices. These are images that automatically adapt to various screen sizes and resolutions, such as mobile devices and desktop computers. Use the srcset attribute in your HTML to specify multiple image sizes. This allows the browser to choose the best image based on the user’s device.
• Resize images according to website dimensions. While you may want to present your product in the best possible light, it’s better not to use images with higher resolutions than necessary. This increases file size and loading.
• Finally, do you need so many images? Review your current standing and reduce the number of visuals to a tolerable minimum. Also, replace GIFs with videos where possible. Videos have smaller file sizes and can show content to users before they are completely downloaded.

How to Optimize Website Speed: Conclusion

Optimizing a website’s speed brings numerous advantages for UX, SEO, conversion rates, and other metrics. But it’s not always easy to understand what exactly you need to mend. Where should you start? Of course, the initial step is conducting a website audit using the tools mentioned in this article.

After that, you can plan your next move, whether it’s changing your hosting service or provider or setting up a CDN. Consider managed hosting to grant technical details to the hosting vendor. It can also simplify website development.

Take a serious look at your images. Compress them and select the suitable formats.

We’ve examined just several practical strategies to make your website more rapid. There are more strategies, too. Besides them, you may also need to take the following steps:

• reduce HTTP requests;
• minify CSS and JavaScript files to get rid of extraneous code;
• employ browser caching to store resources locally in a temporary storage location;
• prioritize mobile optimization and use gzip compression (gzip compression minimizes the size of HTTP requests and responses before transmitting some file types to the browser).

Evaluate plugins and external resources, as too many widgets can slow down your site. Run regular performance tests and speed tests. Implement these tips, and your users will thank you. Happy optimizing!

About the Author

Alex Husar

Alex Husar is a chief technology officer at Onilab, a full-service eCommerce agency with a focus on Magento. With almost a decade of professional experience, Alex has unique expertise in Magento migration, full-stack development, and PWAs creation. He applies both technical knowledge and management techniques to lead Magento and Salesforce projects.