If you have ever dabbled in SEO, you will no doubt have heard that the speed of your website is important.
It is important for SEO, as it is one of Google’s ranking factors, but it is also extremely important for the overall user experience of your website. Everyone is in a rush these days and extremely impatient.
A sluggish website can, and will, have a real impact on how your users react to your website and lengthy delays in content loading will inevitably lead to a reduced engagement rate.
Fortunately, it is usually reasonably easy to make improvements to your page load speed. Most web platforms have a wide range of plugins available that exist purely to increase the speed of a site, so it is often a simple case of installing one of the plugins and configuring the options the plugin offers.
I hope that it may be helpful to look at 10 tips to speed up your website. These will all help to enhance your chances of SEO success, but should also be considered as a great way to improve the user experience of those visiting your website.
In no particular order:
1. Invest in excellent web hosting
Your web hosting environment plays a crucial role in site speed and it is definitely an area that I would not skimp on. Web hosting is not very expensive for most sites, so I really would encourage you to select a high-performance hosting provider that offers SSD storage, scalable resources and server-side caching for better performance.
2. Optimise images
Huge, unoptimised images are one of the biggest culprits of slow websites. There is no point loading huge images that are simply squashed in the web page, so always start with appropriately sized (in terms of physical dimensions) images but it is also worthwhile optimising (in terms of file size) before uploading. There are also plenty of tools that will help optimise / compress images once uploaded to your site, as well as automatically converting to modern formats such as WebP, which offer better compression.
2. Enable browser caching
Caching allows browsers to store frequently accessed resources, reducing load times for repeat visitors. This may well be one for your web developer, if you are not very technically-minded, but you should have a discussion around ensuring that static files like images, stylesheets and scripts are stored in the browser’s cache for a set period.
3. Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML
Minification is a process that removes unnecessary characters, such as whitespace and comments, from source code. This can lead to surprising reductions in file size, depending on the quality of the code. This is usually achieved by using a plugin, or it is an option in the ‘all in one’ plugins such as WP Rocket, if you are a WordPress user. You should, however, make sure that you test your site carefully once you have switched minification on as it can break sites…
4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN distributes your site’s files across multiple servers worldwide, ensuring users can access content from the server closest to them. This reduces latency and speeds up page loading times. Depending on your web host, you may have this enabled by default, but there are plenty of 3rd party CDNs that you can use to distribute your site to increase speed if your web host does not offer this service.
5. Reduce HTTP requests
Every file (CSS / JavaScript / images /etc) on your site requires an HTTP request. Whilst each request should happen in the blink of an eye, it is good practice to reduce the total number of requests where possible, as this will speed up your site. You can achieve this by combining multiple files where possible. Again, there are plugins that will do this automatically for you, depending on your website platform, but there are ‘http request efficient’ ways of coding the site, such as CSS sprites, that you should talk to your developer about.
6. Enable Gzip compression
Gzip compression is a technical solution to shrink down your website’s files before sending them to the user’s browser. This needs to be enabled at the server level, but most web servers, including Apache and Nginx, support Gzip compression. Depending on the nature of your website, this option can really help reduce the overall size of the page being rendered in the user’s browser.
7. Implement lazy loading
Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-essential images and videos until they are needed. In most cases, this simply means that any off-screen images and videos are not actually loaded until the user scrolls and the image / video comes into view. If this is not used, all assets have to be loaded before the page load is complete, which can create a significant delay if you have lots of images or videos. With video files, it is almost always best not to load the actual video file until the user has specifically requested to watch it, e.g. by pressing a ‘play’ button.
9. Reduce redirects
Where a URL is removed from a website, it is good SEO practice to implement a 301 redirect to send the user to the most appropriate page that still exists, but also to instruct the search engines that the old URL has been removed and to (hopefully) swap it for the new one. This protects rankings that the old URL enjoyed. Over the years, especially where a bigger website refresh is undertaken, it is common to see the number of redirects escalate very quickly. Each redirect adds an extra HTTP request-response cycle, increasing load times. It is therefore very advisable to regularly review the use of redirects and ensure that any redirect chains are removed by updating the source redirect.
10. Update plugins
Depending on your website platform, you are likely to use plugins. It is a good idea to regularly update both the main platform and all plugins as updates are often focused on performance improvements and it should ensure that you are using all the latest web technologies. As with the minification tip, you will need to make sure that you back up your site before updating all plugins and test thoroughly, as updates *can* break sites, but keeping everything up to date should help speed things up and also ensure that any security vulnerabilities have been patched.
And finally…
I hope this is a helpful checklist to use with your web developer to ensure that you are doing as much as possible to ensure that your website is fast.
Site speed is something that you should check on a regular basis. There are lots of tools out there to help understand where things may be slowing up but I would generally use a combination of https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. They are both free and easy to use, so there is no excuse :-)
