Creating a good online experience also means optimizing website speed. With mobile devices now the primary method of web browsing, website speed is an even greater metric. Users are likely to exit without reading, using, or transacting on services offered by your site.
One of the easiest ways to improve website speed is identifying and removing the excess that is slowing your page down. You don’t necessarily need to be a developer to take these steps. There are many ways to optimize your images, for example.
This guide is meant to help you navigate some of the most common techniques used to speed up website performance while enhancing the end-to-end user experience.
Why Website Speed Matters
The impact of a website’s speed goes beyond just user experience. It impacts search engine optimization (SEO) as well. Web users are notoriously impatient and leave a page that hasn’t loaded in the time they expected.
A fast website improves:
User experience
User retention
Mobile user experience
Site navigation
SEO
User engagement
Consider a visitor looks for an article with a search engine and clicks your website. Page load time is long and competitive sites are displaying instantly. The user presumably leaves your website and returns to the search results.
Creating an optimized website should be part of your marketing strategy.
- Optimize Your Images
Large images are often one of the primary reasons for slow page load times. High resolution images are heavy and can contain a lot of data. There is a lot of data for the browser to download.
Optimizing your Images can help improve page speed. There are various techniques you can use to prevent slow loading times caused by large images.
Before you upload images:
Resize them to the correct dimensions.
Compress them.
Use the WebP format if it is an option.
Don’t upload huge files that are not required.
Add appropriate image dimensions.
E.g. your website displays an image at 800 by 500 px. No bonus is gained by uploading a 4000 by 2500 px image.
Image optimization helps websites a lot. It optimizes size while keeping the quality good.
- Choose a Good Hosting Provider
Your hosting server determines your website performance.
Optimizing your website won’t matter if your hosting is slow and overloaded.
While choosing your hosting, focus on:
Server performance
Server location
Available resources
up time
Scalability
Customer support
If your visitors are primarily in India, choose infrastructure for Indian users.
If your website has grown, you may need to move to better hosting.
- Use Website Caching
Resources that make loading a website faster can be stored on user devices.
Caching is implemented with caching plugins on WordPress websites.
Servers have to spend a lot less time processing if caching is done, and therefore websites become faster to load.
Don’t install multiple caching plugins. They may create problems rather than increasing speed.
- Limit Plugins
Plugins are a great way to add features to your website, but using too many can affect your site speed.
If you take a look at your plugin list periodically and ask yourself a few things:
How often do I use this plugin?
Could I replace this plugin with one that has the feature I need?
Has this plugin been updated lately?
Do I even need this plugin?
Then you should remove off excess plugins.
As an example, if you have three plugins that do similar optimization tasks, you could simplify your plugins by only keeping one.
- magnify CSS, JS and HTML
Websites will need HTML, CSS, and JS files to store their structures along with the website’s design and some interactivity.
There might be some unnecessary things in these files like formatting, comments, or just extraneous characters.
Minimizing will eliminate those things and reduce the size of your files.
While there are plenty of helpful WordPress tools to optimize your site, minifying will be most effective if you edit the code yourself.
- Use a Content Delivery Network
Also known as a CDN, a content Delivery Network, stores copies of your website in different places and improves your site’s speed.
A CDN is most useful when you have visitors that span many different countries/regions.
A CDN can cache and deliver:
Easy to add images
CSS files
JS files
Fonts
Other file types that won’t change frequently
Depending on what kind of website you have and where your visitors are, a CDN can speed up your website significantly.
- Improve Your Website’s Mobile Speed
More than half of the world’s population browses the internet using smartphones. Therefore, improving the performance of desktop sites will not suffice.
You need to check what happens on your site when accessed through a smartphone.
Check for:
Large images
Unnecessary animations
Large fonts
Background videos
Heavy menus
Anything that loads unnecessarily
Often simpler mobile site designs perform better than sites filled to the brim with animations and large visuals.
Ensure that your important information is loaded earlier and you have effective navigation.
- Avoid Too Many Heavy Animations
Although animations can help site design, too many animations can increase the amount of work a browser needs to perform.
Large sliders, auto play videos, animated backgrounds and a host of effects can lead to slower sites.
Use animations judiciously.
Example: A simple blog may not require a background video that loads, plays, and loops.
- Optimize Your Website Fonts
Fonts will also make a difference to your performance.
Using too many font families and weights can make your site slower because it requires a large number of resources to load.
Try to:
Maintain fewer font families
Remove unimportant weights
Only load the resources you actually need
Avoid decorative fonts
Fonts for a digital marketing blog may not need to be more than two.
- Clean Up Your Database
WordPress sites can retain lots of unnecessary database information.
Example:
Old post revisions
Spam comments
Deleted content
Temporary data
Unused information from plugins
Regular database maintenance can help keep your website organized.
One other important tip: before making major database changes, a backup must always be made.
- Reduce Redirects
URL redirects send users to a new destination URL, and are useful when the page has been moved. Unnecessarily adding redirects causes a user to have to go through more redirects to finally get to the requested page.
The URL redirects chain is inefficient:
Old URL → Redirect → Another URL → Final URL
A better, and more efficient, chain is:
Old URL → Final URL
Check your site. Remove redirect chains and set up important links internally so they point straight to the correct URLs.
- Test Website Speed Frequently
How your site appears to you at your location on your network and device isn’t a completely accurate way to gauge site performance.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and other performance tests to help identify problems and areas of your site that need work.
Pay attention to areas like:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Image optimization
JavaScript
CSS
Server response time
These reported issues can guide you on where to focus improvements.
Common Mistakes When Working On Website Speed
Avoid these mistakes when addressing performance issues on your site:
- Installing numerous optimization plugins
- Uploading huge images
- Using unrelated animations
- Neglecting mobile performance
Testing before and after optimization: Test your website before and after optimization.
Final Thoughts
You do not need to be tech-savvy to learn how to optimize your website for faster loading speeds. To begin, you can optimize your website by compressing images, enabling browser caching, uninstalling unneeded website plug-ins and selecting managed or quality website hosting.
For WordPress websites, the optimization of your website should be a continuous process. Regularly test your website, identify the largest issues, and fix the issues in order of prioritization.
Faster loading websites not only enhances the user experience, but can also improve the foundation of SEO and your digital marketing efforts.
Quick Checklist
Prior to the publication of your website or blog:
images are compressed
if possible, WebP is used
caching is enabled
unneeded plugins are removed
CSS, JS, HTML are optimized
performance is checked on mobile devices
unneeded animations are removed
Page load time and performance is consistent and fast
redirects are limited
hosting is monitored and fast for performance
SEO tip: Never target 3% keyword density. I will naturally distribute the phrase “how to make your website faster” throughout the article, and I will rely on close variants such website speed optimization, performance improvement, and loading time as Page Speed and website performance optimization.