A slow website can have many consequences, including loss of traffic and potential customers. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of everything you will want to look at to make sure your site is optimised.
If you’ve ever wondered if you should spend time optimising your website, the answer is a definite yes. Although it is a process that can take a while, the rewards can be huge.
Achieving high website traffic is one of the main goals of any small business after launching a new site. This makes sense since more website traffic usually results in more business and more profit in the long run.
However, no matter how good your website design is, or how interesting your content is, you need to ensure your website is fully optimised if you want to achieve and maintain a high traffic volume.
This process should start by looking at your website speed.
Google and your visitors don’t like slow websites
A second’s difference in the loading speed of a page might not seem much. However, in the world of Google algorithms, it is a massive difference, and you might see your site heavily penalised if you don’t take it seriously.
A slow website usually results in fewer page views, a decrease in customer satisfaction and fewer conversions.
Google recently announced one of the most important variables it is going to consider to prioritise websites is site speed. The reason why it prioritises it is because site speed is one of the most important factors contributing to positive user experience.
After all, visitors are more likely to leave your website if you’ve got a slow-loading site. Therefore, SEO nowadays is impossible to do without a correct optimisation of the loading times of the pages of your site.
Improve your server’s response time
Of course, your server response time is one of the main factors that will influence how fast your site is. Your server response time depends on the amount of traffic you receive, the code on each page and the hosting solution you use.
Make sure your server response time is under 200ms and make any necessary changes to your website if you can’t guarantee that speed.
To improve your server response time, you can start looking for issues such as lack of memory, slow database queries or slow routing.
Use a CDN
What is a CDN?
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a group of servers that work together to deliver Internet content fast. A CDN can make loading internet content such as HMTL pages, JavaScript, CSS and rich media faster.
Traditional hosting services without CDNs do not meet the performance that users and search engines now expect. That is because CDNs decrease your website’s load times. They do this by serving your site from data centres closer to your site’s visitors, meaning there are fewer ‘hops’ in the network. CDNs also use cache to ensure fast delivery of images, JavaScript and CSS files to your visitors.
A CDN improves the speed, reliability and uptime of your website. Your visitors will access the content faster.
By improving website speed, a CDN can reduce bounce rates and increase the amount of time your visitors stay on your website. They can also help prevent service interruptions and they can even improve security.
The more content you cache, the faster your website will load. However, you can take complete control over how long we store your images, JavaScript and CSS at our edge on a per-item basis. You can also clear your edge cache at any time, so that if you make changes to your website, they are reflected in the live version, right away.
Purging the cache may temporarily degrade the performance for your website, due to the files having to be reloaded to the edge cache. However, you won’t have to wait long until the files are cached again.
How to get a CDN for free
At Patrick Internet, we are now offering free CDN with enterprise-level connectivity, which would normally cost more than £20 per month. Our design uses the same internet exchange points (neural data centres) used by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, to name just a few.
Your ISP will route the visitors’ browser, to our nearest POP, reducing the potential number of delays on the journey.
Contact us to get your free CDN.
Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
One of the main things that might be slowing down your website the most is its own code. And whilst you obviously need all that code for it to work properly, there are things you can do to make your site load faster.
What is minification?
Minification is the process of reducing the size of all HTML, style and JavaScript files by removing spaces, line breaks, block delimiters and other unnecessary characters and removing comments and any parts of the code that aren’t currently being used.
Manual minification
You can minify your HMTL, CSS and JavaScript files manually with tools like minifycode.com, htmlcompressor.com or refresh-sf.com. These tools allow you to paste in or upload your code, click a button to minify and download the new, minified code file, which you can then reupload to your site.
How to minify using a plugin
If you think manual minification is a bit scary and don’t want to make any mistakes, there are other options.
If you’ve got a WordPress site, you can also minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript using a plugin. There are a lot of free plugins that you can use, such as Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache or Fast Velocity Minify.
Take a look at these minify resources from Google for more information about how to minify your website’s files.
Compress HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
Once you have minified your code, you also need to compress the files, especially if they are bigger than 150 bytes. You can do this by using a file compression application such as Gzip.
Optimise images
Large images can also take its toll on page speed. To solve this, you will need to use Photoshop or a similar program to compress all your images (without compromising image quality) before you (re)upload them to your site.
You also need to consider the format. As a rule of thumb, PNGs are better for graphics, whilst JPEG is better for photographs.
Reduce redirects
Page redirects can be useful in various circumstances. For instance, if you’re moving your website from one domain to another, you need to implement 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new ones. This prevents users from finding a 404-page where there was another page before. It also saves you from having broken links on your site (which is detrimental to SEO).
However, when a page redirects the user to a second page, the response time increases, making the final page load slower. Think about it as an unnecessary middle step.
You can use a tool like Screaming Frog to ‘crawl’ your website and download a list of all your redirects.
Remove render-blocking JavaScript
JavaScript can make your website very visually appealing. However, it can make your website painfully slow and, in some instances, it can even prevent some pages from loading.
To remove render-blocking Javascript, you first need to identify the code that needs removing. You can do this by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, a tool that scans your website for the precise files that are render-blocking a page. PageSpeed Insights will provide you with the full list of script resources that you need to evaluate.
Once you’ve got your list, you can choose how you want to fix the code. You can either make the scripts inlined, that is, added directly into the HTML of the page so that they only load when they are needed.
Alternatively, you can defer the script, so that they load only after other portions of the page have loaded.
Both options remove the JavaScript from the head of the page and add it into other sections of the HTML code. You will normally want to move it to the body of the page, or you can also place it on the footer section if the JavaScript can wait until the rest of the page has loaded.
Leverage browser caching
As we’ve seen above, for a website to load, it first needs to properly display all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and images which, depending on the size of the files, can take quite a bit of time.
If your visitors are using a mobile device to access your site (and this is an increasingly popular option) and/or have a slow internet connection, another way of improving your site speed for your recurring visitors is by leveraging browser caching.
What is browser caching and how does it work?
Browser caching basically works by storing your site’s files locally in your own visitor’s browser.
Once a user has visited your site, their browser will cache a lot of the information, including images, CSS and JavaScript files, etc.
That way, when they go back to your site for the second time, their browser won’t have to reload the page from the beginning. Instead, it will retrieve all that information that it already has in store to improve the loading time of the website, and therefore, the user experience.
How to leverage browser caching
To make it work, you can set your “expires” header with Apache for how long you want the browser to cache the information. A year is a reasonable time period for most parts of the website, such as logos, header images, etc. that you are not likely to change often.
To do this, you need to find your .htaccess file in the root of your domain, where you can then set your caching parameters to give instructions to the browser as to which files you want it to cache.
You can set different parameters for images, videos, fonts, CSS, JavaScript and others, depending on how frequently they are updated.
If you are in the process of updating your website or working with a web designer, you might want to refrain from leveraging browser caching until the process is finished. Otherwise, you will not be able to see any changes you’ve made to the website, because you will be getting a cached version of it.
The ultimate checklist to improve your website speed
- Implement a content distribution network
- Optimise all your images
- Optimise any videos
- Make sure images, videos and other rich media content is cached
- Compress your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Reduce redirects
- Use a fast hosting solution
- Make sure your server response time is under 200ms
Patrick Internet provides premium unlimited website hosting with free CDN and optimisation tools designed to help you grow your online presence. Get in touch to find out more.
