Even before we have seen how website’s speed impacts search rankings and not only that it can also impact conversion and ROI. That’s why we have seen lots of articles about website speed improvement. And for today’s post, we are thankful for one of the guest infographic from Rick Talavera of Singlehop, together with them we want to emphasize the essence of site speed.
It was pointed out in the above infographic that speed is truly critical and if your websites takes too long to load, you will lose visitors, influence and sales. Remember that 1 out 4 visitors will abandon a page in less than 4 seconds if it doesn’t load. Take note we have to consider that it is not only about front end, remember that we need to take a look and improve also our back end.
How to Keep your Site Snappy?
1. It always starts with testing. Through this first step you will see on which part to improve. And below are the tools that you can use:
- Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- WordPress: Google Analytics Plug-in by Yoast (incorporates PageSpeed insights)
- Drupal Speedy
2. Applying the Front End Solutions. For the website’s front-end there are lots of elements that needs to consider and below are the ways that you can improve:
Redesign and Reorganize. There are elements that clutters which slows down a website and aside from if content is not organize it could lead to user’s confusion. And below are the ways that supports your redesigning and reorganizing for site’s speed improvement.
- Refresh and reorganize content
- Simplify the design
- Use fewer “widgets”
- Go fully responsive
Plug Out – Remember that less than 25% of sites use Flash today vs. nearly 50% in 2011. It’s time to plug-out and if it’s not necessary to use, avoid using flash.
- Replicate large Flash plug-ins with HTML 5 instead for quicker load times
Optimize your Images– Images play an important role in website’s attractiveness but it can be one of the main reason why a website can load too slow and may end up making the user decide to close the website immediately, as the old quote says: “Time is Gold”, and yes it is truly critical. It is time to move.
- Several image sizes with appropriate HTML5 markup to accommodate responsive design- consider SVG (scalable vector graphic format)
- Use CSS styling for backgrounds and borders rather than decorative images
Social Smarts – Just like images, social shares has a big impact for a website visibility, traffic and conversion but it can also make a site load too slow because of heavy scripting, this is not about deciding to remove this important buttons in our site it is all about optimization and below are the things that we can do to speed up a site:
- Using JavaScript-heavy plugins to manage social sharing adds bloat and extra HTTP calls
- Use share buttons that require minimal scripting
- Load Social media scripts asynchronously
When we talk about site speed improvement, we must also consider the mobile site. Take note that nearly 60% of mobile users expect sites to be as fast or faster on their phone as a desktop or laptop. If this will be the case, if your search console reflected that most of your users are using mobile devices, you have to move now and make it mobile responsive.
3. Applying the Back End Solutions. When we want to improve site speed, we need to consider also its back-end. It plays a big role especially in terms of site loading and size. And below are the ways to improve its elements.
Content Caching. When caching will be applied it can reduce content loading time and would therefore help in improving a user site’s experience. And below are the ways in applying content caching.
- Use plugins to create static content that speeds up server processing and delivery
- For WordPress, these are the following tools that you can consider: W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache
- If you have a Drupal site, you can do Page- and block-level caching are built in list of performance-related modules
Minify . This is a programming term which means to remove unnecessary characters that are not required for the code to execute. It can remove white space characters, new line characters, comments and block delimiters. For minification you can do the following:
- Stripping unnecessary characters reduces overall file size without affecting the page display
- If you’re having WordPress site, you can use the following plug-ins: Better WordPress Minify, WP Super Minify
- A Drupal site can use the following : Speedy, Minify
Content Delivery network. Did you know that only 11% of websites currently host HTML files on CDN Servers? Content Delivery Network or CDN is a network of servers that is located in different locations across the globe and would therefore help in producing the nearest copy to the user which truly have a big impact in terms of site’s loading. And below are the ways to make it possible:
- Stores content on servers close to visitors’ physical locations
- Google Hosted libraries is the most popular CDN service
Scalability. It means the ability to handle a growing amount of work. And to make this move, you can do the following:
- Have the ability to increase resources as your site grows to avoid downtime
- Cloud platforms let you scale infrastructure according to your site’s needs
Private Cloud Hosting. It can offer a custom solution that can cater to your website needs but you have to consider security or the safety of your consumers.
- Find a custom server solution for your business needs
- Use SSL encryption to keep customers safe
Here’s the short take, it is not about for search rankings, it more on our ultimate goal and that is to capture are target users. A second improvement can give you a 7% increase in conversion, as seen at Kissmetrics from data of Gomez.com stated that a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
As I have said before, if you’re rankings are down, it’s time to move backwards, Know the real problem, and not just the symptoms. And after diagnosing, it’s time to move and apply necessary solution. Nothing will happens, if you’re constant with your decision to do nothing. Fellows, friends, guest, dear website owners, it’s not yet too late. It’s to make our website run faster.
Again, Thanks Rick Talavera for sharing this infographic.
What’s your site’s speed? Are you contented with it? Do you have tips also in making your site runs faster, don’t hesitate to share it here. Or you want also to share a guest post, don’t hesitate to contact me.
If you need some SEO help, don’t hesitate also to contact me. I am always here for your queries.