If a person navigates to one of your website’s pages and it takes more than a few seconds to load, the person is likely to jump off the page, meaning you can miss out on a possible conversion.
Fortunately, there is an approach to enhance page speed, but it requires finding the problem(s) that lead to sluggish load times.
It can be hard to know the exact issue, so Google PageSpeed Insights is an effective way to help you figure it out. Google takes into account a variety of elements to calculate the total load time score on PageSpeed. When looking at page speed, Google provides a collection of measurements that influence the rating. Let’s find out what those metrics are.
Why Is It Important to Improve Page Speed?
The rate at which a page load has a significant effect on how users interact with it, having the potential to either be successful or unsuccessful. Page load speed greatly enhances the user experience, leading to more page views, greater conversions, and a lower abandonment rate. Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of increasing web page loading speed.
1. Improve User Experience by Increasing Website Speed
Our investigation discovered that nearly half of all customers anticipate a website to load in two seconds or less.
Every second afterward damages the user experience. Audiences don’t desire to delay for your page to open, and they’ll frequently hover away to look for a different company that has a better user interface.
2. Increase Page Views
It’s possible that you have observed that two of the figures I said, Longest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, have an effect on where Google places a webpage. Google is striving to deliver superior search results to users and is taking into account load times as a measure of success. Higher page speeds may result in a higher position on Google’s search engine.
3. Increase Conversions
If your pages load rapidly, it is reasonable to assume your users will be more content and more likely to become customers. The research conducted by HubSpot on 12 separate instances found that by lowering the amount of time it took for the page to load, there was an increase in conversions ranging from 3 to 17%.
We did the math. If your website has an online store that produces $10,000 daily, a one-second slowdown in loading time can cost you an estimated 2.5 million dollars every year.
4. Lower Bounce Rate
It is reported by Think with Google that if the time it takes for a page to load increases from one second to three seconds, the chance of people leaving the page goes up by 32 percent. If the amount of time increases from one to five seconds, the chances of this happening will have gone up by 90 percent.
A tiny amount of time can be the distinction between retaining and converting users or letting them slip away.
How to measure and run a page speed test
To begin enhancing your swiftness, you should begin with an assessment.
This procedure aids in identifying the parts of your website that could use some improvement. It is important to test your website for both desktop and mobile versions, as well as its home page and product pages.
Merchants often employ Google PageSpeed Insights as an essential and well-used tool to evaluate page speed. This creates a standard of comparison that can be assumed to be the one Google utilizes, and this is also the reference Shopify keeps in mind when they judge your website, which you can find in the administrator’s area.
You can find out how quickly your website loads on both mobile and desktop by running it through the tool. Additionally, you’ll see if achieving the Core Web Vitals’ standards is possible. Next, it will provide suggestions on areas where you can make changes.
Ways to Increase Page Speed
Test your website’s current performance with a tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights to establish a reference point.
You will be asked to enter a web address and the program will spend some time examining your page.
Once finished, you should receive a complete rating that looks like this.
This is a pretty low score, but don’t panic. Google states that there are multiple elements that can affect the ultimate ranking and lead to changes. Some of these factors include:
- conducting A/B tests
- changing the ads on your page
- changes in internet traffic routing
- testing on different devices, such as a high-performance desktop and a low-performance laptop
- browser extensions that inject JavaScript, which can add or modify network requests
- antivirus software
Google is able to look over numerous factors and give you a list of options and tests that can help you decrease the time it takes your page to load.
You can also try the following actions to increase page speed:
1. Limit Redirects
The more times the server needs to relocate resources to get to the right page, the longer it takes for it to load. Eliminate unnecessary redirects wherever you can.
2. Include the Trailing Slash
Don’t forget to add a slash at the conclusion of the URL. By engaging in this action, you let the server know there are no folders or directories that need to be looked through, and this page is the ultimate ending point.
It will cut a tiny amount of time off your loading speed, and every millisecond makes a difference.
3. Compress and Optimize Images
Using large image files or a lot of images can greatly reduce the time it takes for your page to load. Ensure that all your pictures are sized and condensed correctly.
They should be preserved in the appropriate format too. PNG and JPEG formats of files possess the capacity for being compressed quickly and effortlessly, and all web browsers can present them.
Using less space to store an image is known as compressing, which will lower the file size and be displayed in KB or MB. Generally, high-quality pictures can usually be compressed by somewhere between 60 and 80 percent. You should never have an image larger than 1MB.
Altering the dimensions adjusts the size of the picture on the page. Large images should cover the full width of your web page (roughly 1900 pixels) while smaller pictures should have no more than 700 pixels. You can always make something smaller, but almost impossible to make it bigger without losing the quality of the image.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network utilizes a network of servers to store your site’s data and expedite the loading time of pages. An individual situated in Dublin trying to access a web page hosted in Los Angeles would not have to inquire about the original server but instead about a nearby one situated in Ireland.
Distributing the content across several servers, it lessens the requests to the primary server, resulting in a slower loading time.
5. Limit Plugins and Extra Page Elements
Extra elements such as plugins and JavaScript can affect the loading time of a page. Only incorporate the essentials needed for your page.
Naturally, there are extensions available to aid in making the website faster. Add-ons that can automatically reduce the size of images, compress programming code, and delay the loading of JavaScript can improve the speed of a web page. Decide if the extra features provided by these plugins are worth any decrease in page speed.
6. Minify Your HTML or CSS
When you reduce the amount of code your site uses, you eliminate all the gaps, commentary, and additional formatting that coders use to make their code clear and more convenient to modify in the long run. A server does not require a bunch of things to process HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, and its presence can hamper an attempt to load up a page.
There are tools to help you minify your sites:
- YUI Compressor from Yahoo! for CSS
- Google Closure Compiler for JavaScript
- Microsoft Ajax Minifier for CSS
- HTMLMinifier for HTML
7. Utilize Caching
When a website utilizes caching, the server stores replicas of certain pages, allowing it to access them quickly and reduce the load time needed to load the site. By using caching, you can reduce time.
8. Avoid hero slides and carousels
Rotating carousels and image sliders can be immensely slow to load, which can reduce the weight of the website. They are also an issue for accessibility and a significant hindrance to conversions.
Since the majority of the time sliders are among the initial elements shown on the main page (being placed within easy reach), the browser must quickly download a large file.
It’s most effective to just use one image.
9. Add videos with lite embeds
Incredible as it may seem, the method by which you embed videos on your site can influence the speed of your page. Essentially, by utilizing the code that YouTube provides by default, your website will become heavier as the files linked begin downloading before the user even has a chance to select the ‘play’ option.
You can add videos to your webpage quickly and easily with lite embeds. When the browser accesses the page, the only image included will be a thumbnail. The rest of the video can only be accessed if the user chooses to interact with it.
If the video is located beneath the document’s fold line, it can be lazyloaded, meaning that it will not be downloaded until the user scrolls to it.
10. Set image dimensions
There are two image dimension recommendations you should use to improve page speed:
- Use srcrets: This is an attribute of an image tag. When using srcsets, the developer adds links to the image that are all different sizes—large and small. This allows the browser to only download the image best suited for the screen size. On mobile, the browser would download a smaller version of the image. On a desktop, it would download a larger, more high-res version.
- Set the image width and height: This tells the browser what the image’s aspect ratio is, helping it know in advance how much space the image will take up. It prevents the page from jumping around when loading since the browser can essentially reserve the space needed for each image before it’s actually downloaded.
All items on a website need to be loaded at some point, but JavaScript and CSS files can produce a problem as they must also be processed.
The browser suspends displaying to guarantee that the documents are operated in the most effective manner, which may briefly stop content from being accessed.
The most effective approach is to place the JavaScript code at the beginning of the HTML document so that the browser can start downloading it without delay. Then, put off loading it or do it asynchronously (these are characteristics added to the script tag).
Both defer and async allow the script to be downloaded while not hindering the page from displaying. When downloaded, an async script will begin running straight away, no matter if the page is still in the process of being generated or not.
The scripts marked as deferred will not be executed until the page has been fully processed, and they will be run in the order specified. If you have three delayed scripts, the first one will be carried out, followed by the second, and then the subsequent ones.
Scripts that are set to run asynchronously will be performed as soon as each is available, regardless of the order in which they were declared.
The objective is to ensure important resources are downloaded rapidly, without hindering the rendering of the web page.
11. Reduce redirects
A redirect refers to a process that redirects both users and search engines to a different webpage from the one they first requested. Redirects are often employed when a URL is faulty, a new page or website has been created, or when an already existing page is in the middle of being updated and visitors must be directed elsewhere.
Nevertheless, using the wrong kind of redirects can not only hinder your SEO performance, but it can also slow down the time needed for a page to load due to an extra HTTP request that the browser must go through.
There are two types of redirects:
- 301 redirects tell search engines that a website or page is moved permanently.
- 302 redirects tell search engines that a website or page is moved temporarily.
Try to avoid using redirects as much as possible. If absolutely necessary, Shopify suggests utilizing a “cachable redirect” or taking advantage of Shopify’s integrated redirect features. These are 301 redirects by default.
You should examine any redirects you made in the past to find out if
- You actually need them
- You’ve used the right type
- You’re redirecting to the right page
Google does not recommend directing people to links that have already been redirected.
12. Clean up broken links
Have you ever gone to an article and clicked a link only to find a 404 page? Users find it exasperating and it negatively impacts your page loading speed since the browser will make an HTTP request in an attempt to load the page.
Shopify suggests two ways to clean up broken links:
- Use a tool like Broken Link Checker to find broken links and manually remove them.
- Create a custom 404 error page to take users who have an incorrect URL.
Conclusion
A quick loading speed has always been an essential element of the user experience. Since page speed is now an element used by Google to decide rankings, it is quite essential to generate website visits and higher rankings.
In order to speed up your page, be aware of frequent problems that make pages load slowly like having overly big pictures or too many plugins.
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