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Page speed is an important factor in website optimization, affecting the user experience and search engine rankings. As such, optimizing page speed is essential for improving the visibility of a website and its content in search engine results. Austin SEO company professionals understand this and can help you improve page speed for faster page load times. So, you don't have to fear your website being too slow and not appearing in search results.
So let's look at best practices to improve page speed and get the most out of your SEO efforts.
Ways to Improve Page Load Time
1. Optimize Your Infrastructure or Use a Speedy Host
Start by ensuring you have the right infrastructure to optimize your website's speed. Be sure that your web stack is up to date and that you use a reliable hosting provider with fast loading speeds. If your host is slow, consider switching to a faster provider that can meet your website's needs.
Host your site on a dedicated or virtual private server (VPS) to get high-performance speeds. However, shared servers can still impede performance even if your website design is sleek and the code is clean. So ensure you are on the latest hardware and software with a reliable hosting provider.
2. Use a CDN and Remove Unused Scripts
Most of your users will probably not be close to your web server. Since reducing the distance between you and your audience isn't viable, consider spreading your content across various servers in different geographic locations instead. Although this may be complicated to implement, it is worth considering.
It is where content delivery networks (CDN) come into play. They help distribute your content across multiple servers efficiently, and your website will load faster for users far from the original server.
Content Delivery Networks are most useful for files that will remain unchanged after upload.
Users select servers based on how close the network is. For example, people commonly choose the server with the shortest response time and the fewest networking stops (also known as hops).
Page speed can be improved by removing unused script tags and elements that are not necessary. It is also important to minimize the number of HTTP requests, as they can significantly slow down your website.
But it can be challenging to determine whether a script or element is in use, so it's a good idea to work with an experienced Austin SEO company to help find the best way to reduce unnecessary HTTP requests. And also helps to identify and remove any invalid HTML tags or scripts that can slow down your website.
3. Use Gzip to Compress Files
GZip data compression on a server level helps reduce the time it takes for pages to load. In other words, GZip takes large sets of data and compresses them to be delivered more efficiently to a user's computer. It reduces the size of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files by up to 70 percent, making it much faster for a website to load.
You must compress your code into small files, as this will reduce network latency and the time it takes to download a page. Implementing GZip will significantly improve your website's page speed and load times.
4. Reduce Redirects
Each time a page is redirected, the user's browser must wait for a server response before moving on. This adds additional loading time and can negatively impact page speed. Therefore, reducing the number of redirects used on your website is important.
For example, if your website has a lot of redirects patterns, look like this:
example.com\> www.example.com > www.example.com/index.html
Then you should consider removing the first two redirects as they can add unnecessary loading time.
5. Minify CSS and JavaScript
Another way to load your pages faster is by minifying JavaScript and CSS files. Minification is a process in which scripts and stylesheets are run to remove unnecessary characters such as spaces, line breaks, and comments that make the code easier for humans to read.
By minifying your code, you can reduce the size of files and improve page speed. It is especially important for mobile users who often have slower internet connections.
6. Clean up your HTML Code
Use streamlined HTML code to make your website load faster. If HTML code is bloated, it takes up more space and becomes transferrable to users at a slower speed. It also impacts JavaScript performance when it's embedded in HTML code.
If your HTML page contains many elements, consider reducing the number of tags and attributes. It will help to streamline your code and improve page speed.
7. Improve Website Speed
The speed of your server's response time is determined by many factors, including how much traffic your site gets, the resources each page uses, what software powers your server, and which hosting solution you use. Addressing performance bottlenecks, such as slow database queries, sluggish routing, and insufficient memory, will improve your server response time. The optimal server response time should be less than 200 ms.
8. Image Optimization
Although large images may look great, they take too much time to load. For optimal image loading times, ensure your images are compressed for the web and in the right file format. Generally speaking, PNGs work better for graphics with fewer than 16 colors, while JPEGs typically perform better with photographs.
CSS sprites can create templates for frequently-used images, like buttons and icons. You can load all your images into a large image using CSS sprites. This reduces the number of HTTP requests and allows you only to display the sections of the images you want to show. This reduces loading time by not making users wait for multiple images.
9. Declutter Your Media Library
Over time, your media library has probably gotten cluttered with old or unused images. This takes up unnecessary space and slows down your website. You can declutter your library by removing any images that you no longer need or use. This will clean up your library and speed up loading times.
10. Use Expires Headers
Expiration headers direct browsers on how to treat certain types of files when revisiting your website. The instructions include telling the browser whether to request a new server copy or if it can load an existing cached version. Doing this can improve your page loading time for returning visitors.
Reducing the number of downloads and HTTP requests speeds up website load time.
Websites today are often overloaded with dozens of files per page. As a result, large files take longer to load onto the page. But in addition, every time a file is transmitted, it requires a request from the server- which graphically illustrates how each successive file slows down the process.
Headers that expire tell the browser how long to store a file on your computer before it needs to be replaced with a new one. This is useful for pages you frequently visit so that your device doesn't have to download everything anew each time you revisit.
Read here to learn: How beneficial it is to do SEO and SEM at the same time.
The Bottom Line
Improving page speed is a crucial step in optimizing your website. It has been proven to increase user engagement, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversions. Following the steps outlined above and with the help of Austin SEO company, you can reduce the page loading times and create a more user-friendly experience for your visitors. Ultimately, this will help you to make the most of your website.