When it comes to websites, most designers concentrate on an appealing look and feel as well as a user experience that is simple to use and meets the brand expectations of the organization.
The most crucial aspect of any website design is its usefulness, but speed is another critical factor.
You could argue that the speed of a website is the most crucial aspect since, regardless of how attractive or useful a page is, if a user must wait too long for all the parts to load, they will likely switch to another website, just like waiting in line for a great pizza slice. If it takes too long to get the slice, you will leave and dine at another place. You must be wondering how search ads, organic search ranking, and ranking relate to page speed at this point, right? Continue reading to find the answer.
- If a website is slow, Google Search, Google Ads, and other search engines and ad platforms will give it a low-quality ranking. Google and other search engines use this data to determine how to rank your website or whether to show your ads.
When you wish to have your website appear at the top of search engine results or have your advertisements shown before those of your competitors, you must ensure that your website loads rapidly and can return values to search engines as quickly as possible. This is crucial because it has an impact on the number of impressions and click-through rate (CTR) of your search results and search advertisements, which in turn affects the volume of traffic to your website and the price of your sponsored media.
Moving forward, we will discuss ways to improve page loading speed.
Configure a fast infrastructure or use a fast host
Page performance optimisation starts with having the proper infrastructure. Make sure your web stack is built for speed. Your website should be hosted on a dedicated, high-performance server. Even with a clear layout and optimised code, shared servers may cause your website to load more slowly. Make sure you're using the newest iterations of the technology.
There are 3 main categories of hosting:
- VPS (Virtual Private Serving) Hosting
- Shared Hosting
- Dedicated Server
Use a CDN
Do you want to know how to speed up the loading of web pages? Reduce the distance between your server and the user for data. That is logical, isn't it? A simple way to do that is by employing a CDN. A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of geographically scattered servers (also known as POPs). When used together, they speed up the delivery of your site's content. No matter if your website uses HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, pictures, or videos, a CDN is a great way to speed it up.
Optimize images
Since websites are a visual medium, photos, logos, and pictures are essential for giving them the right appearance for visitors. Websites must compress their images to achieve the optimum balance of speed and clarity.
You should compress the majority of your photos for a noticeable reduction in load time. Most of the time, you can do this without significantly affecting most consumers' perception of image quality.
Minify files
When a page loads, websites must additionally supply JavaScript, CSS, and other resources. Large file sizes or a large number of files can both contribute to a slow page speed. When a page loads, websites must additionally supply JavaScript, CSS, and other resources. Large file sizes or a large number of files can both contribute to a slow page speed.
You should merge files whenever possible to reduce the number of requests, and you should also remove extraneous code and whitespace to reduce file size.
