Website Speed Optimization — Easy tips to Speed up Your Website
We all want our website to load faster. Visitors of every website are looking for a faster and easier experience. Overall, the websites’ sizes are getting bigger and need to be made as faster as it can, so the visitors find it easier to navigate them.
Website speed is a part of Google search algorithm. User experience is one of the key goals of every website and speed is one of its most crucial aspects. Slow loading site suffers from low user engagement and also lower chances of getting ranked on search engines.
Anyone who has practiced Search Engine Optimization will know that website speed optimization is one of the most crucial and practical things you can do to help your visitors. And with Google recently stating that website speed on mobile is one of its ranking factors;website speed is something that no one should avoid.
Plug-ins
Plug-ins for website speed optimization offers a great way to help do this — especially the image optimizing plug-ins. However, plug-ins may actually be slowing down your site as they include additional SQL and PHP requests that slow down the process. Manually optimizing and re-uploading images can offer huge benefits in compressing, without compromising the image quality. It may take slightly longer but the results can be much more worthwhile.
Upgrading PHP to Version 7
Most of the websites are run using WordPress today, in which case they are using PHP. Upgrading your PHP to version 7 can have huge benefits in speeding up your website. When comparing PHP 7 to its older versions, it can handle 2–3 times the number of requests per second and is much faster at handling the PHP code. Both of which will mean much faster web page load time.
OCSP Stapling for HTTPS
Optimize your HTTPS server by enabling OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) stapling; as well as improving connection times by up to 30%, it improves the security and privacy of your website as well.
Go Through your Third-Party Tools
Third-party tools are sometimes essential to your website,especially when you are using review tools. However, third-party plug-ins and tools add extra baggage to a website and weigh it down with unnecessary long code and JavaScript. Be clever with your third-party tools; make sure they are cached regularly and clear any tools that you don’t need, and get rid of all if they provide no real use to your website.
Manage Client Expectation
When it comes to SEO website speed is a huge factor. Google wants the web to be a faster place for its users in order to be more enjoyable, and, we’re sure the opinion is universal that web is much more enjoyable when websites load quickly.
Conclusion
However, improving the speed of a website rarely sees a huge increment in ranking. It rarely brings about great visibility improvements and won’t immediately bring huge organic traffic changes either. However, what improving website speed does do, is affect crawling stats, improves audience engagement metrics and conversions, and will help improve your brand reputation.
Those are some of the tips we found most useful for website speed optimization. Hopefully, you can take a few of these tips back with you to optimize your website.
