Did you know that the loading speed of your pages influences the final position that your content will occupy in the Google ranking? Knowing how to optimize the load time of the website is essential to obtain better results.
Since July 2018, the page loading speed is a ranking factor for Google and it makes sense that it is so. Have you ever accessed sites that took too long to load and gave up halfway? For Google, offering a good user experience involves speed loading the site.
Therefore, it is not only “about” offering quality content, but also delivering it to the user in the best possible way. Are we going to know some ways to improve the loading speed of a page?
First of all: measure the speed of your website
How do you know if your page’s loading speed is good or bad? There are some online tools for this. This is the case with Google PageSpeed Insights, and GTMetrix, both free, and Pingdom, a paid tool. They all perform a series of tests and assign a grade to the site.
From that note are listed some insights of technical aspects that can be improved on your page. From these tips you can talk to your team responsible for the site to improve features that allow faster loading. The required actions vary from site to site.
Use image optimization tools (compression)
Delay in loading images is one of the most recurring problems on slower sites. The larger the image, the longer the download time and this impacts the metric. Ideally, no image should occupy more than 100 KB, but this is not always possible.
You can use an online tool to do this: TinyPNG. The service is free and allows you to convert images in JPG to PNG format. In the eyes of the user the difference is imperceptible, but in terms of loading speed the gains are significant.
Take advantage of the browser’s cache
“Take advantage of the cache” means passing information to the browser so that they use copies of files available in physical folders available on your hosting server. That is, without having to download everything every time they access, the user will have a faster page load.
These instructions can be configured via .htaccess on Apache servers. For those who use WordPress, the WP Total Cache plugin is able to compress CSS and JavaScript. These are more technical solutions and for them you will need the help of specialized professionals.
Opt for dedicated hosting
It is important to find out if your website hosting is “dedicated” (more expensive) or “shared” (cheaper). It is common that in shared hosting, the available RAM memory is limited, which compromises the download of resources from the server.
In the case of dedicated hosting, this does not happen, as the server becomes exclusive to your website, being able to use all available RAM memory. As a consequence, the response time will always be better. However, assess the costs to see if it is worth investing in this requirement.
Use the AMP feature for mobile charging
AMP is an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a project led by Google and several other social networks for creating an HTML standard on pages so that they load more quickly on smartphones.
Applying AMP to any website is relatively simple. There are plug-ins in WordPress that are easy to configure and Google itself offers many tutorials explaining how to do this. Consider doing this on your website for significant improvements in mobile traffic.
Uninstall unnecessary features
When we are building a website, it is common to test several tools for the most varied purposes. However, once the service is completed, it is essential to disable items that are no longer being used.
This is because if they remain active they will always be loaded at each user request. This unnecessary loading will take a few precious seconds of the page’s loading speed and therefore it is necessary to avoid that these stay there.