How to Increase Page Speed [Here’s What to Do]

Learn Some Tricks On How To Increase Page Speed!

How fast your website loads plays a huge role in how many people stay on your website and convert. 

“Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).”

That’s why they say “the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates.”

And more importantly than all that, you guys specifically asked us for this post.

So today, we’re going to talk about page load time in more depth.

We’ll tell you how to increase page speed for your business so that you don’t lose customers to a fixable problem.

Let’s jump right in!

Defining What Page Speed Is Or What Page Load Time Is

“Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads.”

Page speed is the same thing as “page load time,” but it is not to be confused with “site speed.”

Site speed is the average of several sample pages on a website.

Whereas page speed describes how long a person will wait to start consuming an individual page.

Why Should You Care About Your Page Speed? 

The biggest reason is what we mentioned at the beginning of this post…

…your conversion rate drops by about 4 and a half percent for every extra second your website takes to load.

And if you’re specifically an eCommerce store owner…

…you should know that the highest eCommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds.

Additionally, as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%.

Speaking of mobile, here’s our post on mobile SEO to help you better optimize your website on mobile devices.

So now, some of you may be thinking, “well that’s drastic, it doesn’t take my page ten seconds to load.”

But you should also know that “the probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.”

We know that’s a lot of information we’re throwing at you.

But basically, the longer it takes your page to load, the less likely it is that your customer is going to even stay on your website…

…let alone purchase from you.

And when we talk about longer page load times, we’re talking about seconds and less. 

So for those of you who are like, “oh it only takes like 3 seconds for my page to load, it’s fine”– in this context?

It’s not. That’s not fast enough.

Now the second major reason you want to increase your page speed is for search engines like Google.

Back in 2018, page speed became one of Google ranking factors for mobile searches in addition to desktop searches.

This means your customers aren’t the only ones who care about your page load time; Google does too.

They look at this when determining where to rank your site in the search results.

Now if you want to learn more tips on how to rank higher on SERPs, then here’s the perfect post for that.

So, now that you know what it is and why it matters, let us quickly show you…

How To Check Your Page Speed

There are several websites that offer this tool, some free, some not, but the most common is Google’s free page speed insights tool.

You just enter in the URL you want to analyze, and it will generate a score indicating if your page is fast, average, or slow.

And then, it will give you suggestions on what you can improve on.

10 Tips On How To Increase Page Speed

Now before we get started, we want to give the disclaimer that not all of these will be applicable to every kind of website. 

But our hope is that you can go down this list and just make sure you’re already doing everything that you can to increase your page speed.

1. Remove unnecessary images
2. Lazy load images
3. Minify your images
4. Minify JavaScript files
5. Minify your CSS and HTML coding
6. Use a CDN
7. Switch to a faster DNS provider
8. Leverage browser caching
9. Remove render-blocking JavaScript
10. Reduce redirects

1. Remove unnecessary images

Some of the other steps we’re going to get into today involve optimizing your images.

But, you can save yourself time upfront with this step by removing images that don’t need to be there to begin with. 

This could include any filler, stock images that don’t hold a purpose and/or don’t contribute to your customer’s buying journey. 

If they don’t help convey your message on the page or they don’t help establish a positive feeling with your brand for customers…

…they probably don’t need to be on the page. 

2. Lazy load images

Lazy loading is essentially the practice of loading things as you get to them instead of all at once. 

This means if you have images on the bottom of your page, your web page won’t load those unless the visitor scrolls to that section. 

This helps increase the initial page speed because the page doesn’t have to load everything all at once upfront. 

It can just load images as they appear on the screen when the user is scrolling down your page.

3. Minify your images

Now, this does not mean making your images physically or visibly smaller.

Instead, it means removing text metadata and compressing the image so that the file size isn’t as large.

And therefore, it is easier to load. 

There are many different tools or plugins you can use to do this depending on what type of website you have, be it on:

• WordPress,
• Wix,
• Squarespace,

…and so on, you’ll just need to find a reputable tool that’s compatible with your site.

Now if you are looking for more tools to utilize for your business, check out this post on digital marketing tools next.

4. Minify JavaScript files

Minifying your JavaScript files removes whitespace, code comments, and anything else that’s unnecessary to reduce the file size.

The tools that Google recommends for this are:

• UglifyJS
• The Closure Compiler

Just be careful anytime you make changes to your JavaScript files.

We would continually refresh and test your website as you go along…

…to make sure you don’t accidentally make any errors or changes you don’t want because JavaScript can be finicky sometimes.

5. Minify your CSS and HTML coding

You’re probably seeing a pattern here. But don’t worry, we promise not everything on this list is going to be minification. 

It’s just an easy step you can take with several different aspects of your webpage that makes a noticeable impact on your page speed.

Minifying your CSS and HTML coding:

“removes unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser…

…such as again code comments and formatting, unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and so on.” 

The tools Google recommends for this are:

• CSSNano

• csso

• HTMLMinifier

But again, you’ll want to do your own research with each step to see what’s compatible with your specific website. 

6. Use a CDN

CND stands for Content Delivery Network. 

We’d especially recommend this to anybody who has a global target market.

To help paint a picture of why this is helpful, it’s useful to think about your website this way:

Envision your website as a file that is stored on your computer at home, and just made accessible to the world via the internet. 

If you’re in the US, but people from Ireland, Japan, and Australia are trying to reach your website…

…your webpage loads easier and faster for them with a CDN in place.

The technical definition reads, a CDN:

“is a group of geographically distributed servers that speed up the delivery of web content by bringing it closer to where users are.”

So again, if you service a global audience or sell your products worldwide, we would advise looking into this. 

7. Switch to a faster DNS provider

DNS stands for Domain Name System and it’s used “to control how visitors find your website.

You can think of your domain name as a street address, and DNS acts as your GPS.”

So going off of the previous visual, let’s say you’re based in Atlanta, Georgia and someone in Jackson Hole, Wyoming wants to access your website…

…switching to a faster DNS provider makes the process of that lookup quicker, therefore making your page load faster for them.

8. Leverage browser caching

“Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a cache, or temporary storage location, so that they can be accessed quicker. 

Web browsers cache HTML files, JavaScript, and images in order to load websites more quickly…

…while DNS servers cache DNS records for faster lookups and CDN servers cache content to reduce latency.”

So basically, this means when a previous website visitor returns to your site…

…it won’t have to reload the entire page, thus saving page load time.

Google has more information on how to go about cache-control at this link:

https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/LeverageBrowserCaching

…so be sure to check that out.

9. Remove render-blocking JavaScript

Google says, “Before the browser can render a page it has to build the DOM tree by parsing the HTML markup. 

During this process, whenever the parser encounters a script, it has to stop and execute it before it can continue parsing the HTML.” 

So Google suggests avoiding the use of render-blocking JavaScript altogether, if possible.

And if not, at least try to minimize it. 

10. Reduce redirects

Every time your webpage redirects to another webpage, that’s an additional wait time for your visitor.

So if you can minimize redirects, you can directly minimize the time your visitor is sitting waiting for your page to load.

And that’s it! Those are our top 10 suggested tips on how to increase page speed.

If you’re looking for professionals to help with the tips we mentioned on this list, check out our page speed optimization services today!

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