Your Checklist on How To Speed Up Your Landing Pages

By Jess Burnham, Online Community Strategist at Unbounce

As you may have noticed, we’ve been rolling out features that fall under one theme: page speed. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, slow pages are killing your conversions.

We’ve been busy behind the scenes making sure your pages load as fast as possible (with new features like Speed Boost), but you can also take action!

Here’s a handy checklist to use to ensure your pages are loading as fast as possible. If you’re not doing some of these items yet, we highly encourage you to give them a try to give your pages that extra oomf.

1. Check your image size. Images bigger than 800kb could be slowing your page load time.

Optimize/compress your images to reduce their size. Unbounce will be rolling out Auto Image Optimizer which will automatically resize your images to reduce load time (hooray!). Stay tuned for this new feature in early 2019!

2. Be strategic with the inclusion of images on your pages.

Only include the images that are absolutely necessary. Each image creates its own HTTP request and adds size to the page, thus adding to total load time.

3. Reduce font families/weights, because each font/weight adds to page load time.

Reduce the amount of font families/weights being used on a page. Ideally, pages shouldn’t have more than 3 or 4 font weight/family combinations.

4. Be mindful of how many HTTP Requests are being made on your pages.

Reduce the number of HTTP Requests, because they’re for external resources (external scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.). The more requests that are being made, the longer it will take a page to fully load. Google suggests having less than 75 HTTP requests (for mobile pages).

5. Disable jQuery if your pages aren’t using it; it may be enabled by default. jQuery can potentially slow pages down.

6. This one’s a biggie: optimize your custom scripts.

We’re proud to offer the most customizable experience for our customers by allowing custom scripts on all Unbounce pages, however, there are a few things to keep in mind to make sure your scripts aren’t slowing your pages down:

• Use native javascript functionality when you can.
• Where possible, add scripts ‘Before Body End Tag’. Scripts in the head of your document will slow down the rendering of your page.
• If using scripts with an external source, use the async version if you can. This will stop the script from blocking rendering and will speed up rendering.
• Avoid importing external libraries or multiple versions of external libraries where possible.
• If using inline javascript, ensure that it’s minified. If it isn’t minified yet, use a tool like: https://jscompress.com/

We hope this list proves useful to you. Happy page building!

Originally published at unbounce.com on December 10, 2018.