If a potential customer clicks onto your website and they’re waiting for more than 3-4 seconds for your website to load, you may potentially have lost a customer / lead. It’s fundamental that your page speed is fast in 2021. Having a fast website is essential due to recent changes to Google’s algorithm and over 50% of users using their mobile to access websites; mobile users are not going to wait around very long compared to desktop users.
We highly recommend using Google PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix to see how well your website is performing. With the Google PageSpeed results, if your website is displaying red’s and oranges, this is not a good sign; and you will need to improve your website performance.
GT Metrix will give your website performance a grade between A-F. We find GT Metrix to be one of the most useful tools for checking website performance. They explain to you the problems and how to fix them, which is a huge bonus! Not all website performers will give you an explanation and how to improve.
Thankfully, there are quite a few ways to improve your page speed, we will be explaining 5 of them in our blog.
1. Compress and Optimise Imagery
Imagery is great, and consumers eat with their eyes first. Your imagery helps shape and portray your branding and makes your website what it is. Photo’s and imagery make and sell your product. That said, be wary about your file sizes and how they will impact your sites speed. We often come across large photos on websites and this harms your page speed performance.
It’s important to compress your imagery, you shouldn’t have an image larger than 1 megabyte in size on your website. Why? For mobile users downloading a 1mb image over a poor connection, it will take quite a lot of time!
Here are some free tools to optimise your imagery:
Tinypng – Compress JPG/PNG files max 5MB per file.
Compresspng – Compress 20 png files.
Once you have optimised your imagery on your website, you should re-test your website performance on either Google PageSpeed or GT Metrix. Hopefully, you will have seen a significant improvement in page speed.
2. Minify HTML & CSS
Minifying your HTML and CSS will effectively remove all of the dead spaces and developer notes on your website; putting all your code within 1 line. Think about it… If your website has over 1,000+ lines of code, the server will have to read every line of code that makes your website work. By minifying your HTML & CSS, you are making it far easier for the server to load your website; improving page speed performance.
Here are some tools to help you minify your HTML & CSS:
CSS Minifer – cssminifier.com
Minifier – minifier.org
Minify Code – minifycode.com/html-minifier/
3. Enable Compression
Enabling compression is a great way to decrease page weight. Ideally, your page weight aim should be to stay under 500kb (according to Google). When you decrease the page weight of your website, in theory, your page speed should also be faster!
So how do you enable compression or test that your website is compressed? Well , if you’ve already tested your website on GT Metrix it should tell you. If you haven’t used GT Metrix as yet, you can also use this free compression tester tool.
If your website hasn’t been compressed and you’re using WordPress, this is easy to fix. If you’re not using WordPress, this could be a lot more difficult. You will need to be quite an advanced user with your hosting provider and have an understanding of Apache or Nginx.
For WordPress users, we highly recommend installing a caching plugin, such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, or WP Rocket. These all have a compression feature, and once enabled you should see your page speed rocket!
Are you not using WordPress? Contact us for guidance.
4. Use a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is pretty much what it says on the tin. A CDN is a highly-distributed platform of servers that helps increase the page speed of your website. How? By delivering your website files to the nearest physical location to the user.
There are a few options when it comes to a CDN. You can go and purchase one, or your hosting provider might actually provide one for you for free.
Here are some CDN’s that we have used:
CloudFlare (They have a free option).
Stackpath
KeyCDN
5. Use the Trailing Slash
This is only small but if you include the trailing slash ‘/‘ at the end of a website URL you are telling the server there are no directories to search for; this is the final destination.
If you don’t use the trailing slash, you are telling the server to keep looking through the file directories. We both know there aren’t any more files to look for but the server won’t know this.
Here is an example.
Don’t do this
https://bluecheesedigital.com/social-media
Do this instead
https://bluecheesedigital.com/social-media/
This might only take off a few milliseconds, but they all count when it comes to page speed!
Conclusion –
Having a fast website is imperative in 2021; especially if you want more customers and leads for your business. It’s also critical for SEO, and you will have a greater chance of being top of the Google rankings the faster your website operates.
To improve your website performance, make sure you check the small details: such as the imagery. As we explained earlier, image file size is the most common problem when it comes to page speed. As a side note, make sure you’re using a fast website hosting provider. A lot of hosting providers will push you onto shared hosting which can also slow your website down.
Hopefully, our tips will help you increase your page speed, but if you feel you need any help feel free to send us an email at info@bluecheesedigital.com – good luck!
