Learning how to accelerate a website is important to have more reach and audience with your target audience. The pages with fast loading are extremely important for success on the web, as they influence many factors.
A delay of only one or two seconds can reduce: page views, customer satisfaction, conversions, user experience, search ranking, profits and more...
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How does lack of speed affect your site?
Before going to the tips that can help you in the task of making your site fast and with many visits, you need to highlight some factors that need to be considered:
Increased rejection rate
A slow loading site leads people to abandon it. Especially on the mobile phone, the slower the site, the more likely the visitors will reject according to a Google study.
Believe me: only two seconds can make a big difference and only four seconds can increase rejection rates by 100%. Conclusion: If you want visitors to stay close, make your site fast.
Reduces conversions (less money)
In addition to what I mentioned earlier, speeding up your site also has an effect on conversions. It has already been tested and proven that e-commerce websites when they move from two to one second of page loading, can double their revenue.
Walmart learned that the faster their pages were loaded, the more likely visitors would make a purchase:
-Each second of improvement in site speed increased conversions by up to 2%
-Each reduction in page loading time in 100ms increased incremental revenue by up to 1%.
Decreases search ranking (less organic traffic)
As visitors care about the speed of the site, Google also cares about classifying websites. This is the official policy since 2010 and has been extended to mobile devices since 2018.
The latter is even more important, as Google has switched to a mobile index to fit the modern use of the web. This means that websites are classified according to the performance of their presence on mobile devices, not on desktop sites.
As a consequence, if your site slowly loads on your mobile phone, your search ranking will fall as a whole. And while Google says that this really affects only the slower websites, site speed also affects the bounce rates, the time on the site and other markers that search engines take into account.
Now comes the tips: what to do to improve the performance of your website?
1. Do speed tests often
When trying to speed up your site, it's always a good idea to start with a speed test. This will show your position in terms of loading speed today and will also highlight the problems your site may have.
You have a number of tools you can use for this. One of my favorites is dGoogle itselfHowever, they all work very similarly.
The first step is to insert your URL and press Enter to run the test.
Once you're done, you'll get a general speed score and information about your site. After that, the tools offer some concrete advice on how to make your site better.
In addition, it is a good idea to check your Google Analytics in Behavior> Site speed> Page time.
2. Choose a suitable hosting provider
The server plays a great role in time for the first byte and the loading speed of its pages in general. Unless you know how to build servers by yourself, you're probably renting space on the server of a hosting provider.
While it is normal to use cheap shared hosting at first, after you start receiving traffic, you will need to ensure that your hosting grows according to the demands.
The first thing to observe here is the kind of accommodation you use:
Shared - literally what it says in the name. You share a server with many other sites, all competing for the same features such as CPU, RAM, etc.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) – Similar to shared, however, you have fewer other sites on the same machine and all receive their own dedicated processing resources without the possibility of exceeding them.
Dedicated – here, you have your own server, as well as control over your configuration, hardware and more. However, this requires technical skills to deal with it or money to hire someone who owns it.
Cloud – the fastest type of growing accommodation. The cloud uses a payout model as per use: you get access to as much or as little processing power as you need. Very good for traffic peaks, but also more expensive.
Managed – is especially available for WordPress and is when the provider takes care of most hosting tasks. This includes things like security, backups, performance, etc. With managed hosting, you can focus fully on building your website. However, this type of service has a price.
3. Reduce image size
Images play a special role in the speed of sites, as they are usually one of them, if not the largest elements of the web pages. Check out some ways to ensure that image size does not get out of control:
Use the correct file type – There are various types of image file, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. JPG is a good option for images with many colors, such as photos. PNG is excellent for graphics focusing on text with less than 16 colors or images with transparent backgrounds such as logos. GIFs, on the other hand, are perfect for animated images or small elements with few colors, such as icons.
Cutting images to the size they appear – If an image is only 500 px wide on the screen, it is a waste of features to post a 1,000 px image and reduce it by means of the attribute of width and height.
This still results in the loading of the look in real size. As a consequence, first the image is cut only in the required part and then resized to the minimum necessary.
Compact images – Like other files on your server, you can compress images so they get smaller – without losing image quality. In WordPress, you can use a plugin like Smush , EWWW Image Optimizer or Optimole. They automatically compact images during upload or mass.
4. Check if there are plugins that make your site slower
Although plug-ins are great as a way to make sites more functional and add features, there are many plugins. Installing them on your site indiscriminately not only increases the risk of security problems and conflicts as well as the need for maintenance, but can also slow your site down.
Why is that? Many plugins load extra style sheets and/or JavaScript files, increasing page weight and HTTP requests.
Also, if they are not coded correctly, they can load these assets even in places where they are not needed, sometimes on all pages! So in an effort to speed up your site, it's a good idea to see if you can get rid of any of them.
One way to do this is to test the speed of your site with all the plugins enabled and then selectively disable them one by one and run another speed test each time. This makes more sense if you don't have many plugins on your site as it can be boring.
An alternative is to use Plugin Performance Profiler. It allows you to scan your site and provides a detail of how much each plugin contributes to the loading time of your page.
5. Improve SEO
If the SEO of your website Not on time, you may be damaging traffic without knowing it. Perform regular SEO analytics to make sure you are not making common mistakes and to ensure that all pages are operating smoothly and providing good user experience to visitors.
Some content guidelines: create a meta description that involves the main keywords and services of your business, try to climb light but with good resolution images, always including the ALT attribute. Having internal links that direct to other pages helps in organic reach.
Conclusion
Providing increased site speed is an absolutely crucial skill. Good performance is a priority for users and search engines and therefore essential for the success of their pages.
Now that you know why speed is important, what speed loading should aim at, how to test your current state and many ways to make your site faster is time for implementation.
Choose some actions that are within your reach and start doing so. Once there, check the results and see what makes most sense. In time, you will greatly improve the speed of your site and therefore the user experience, and will be on the way to stand out on the internet with good organic reach.
