In the process of optimizing a website, there are many determining variables, and page speed is one of the most important.
Basically, this is the time it takes for a page to load. But… Do you know what the page speed of your website is?
And, above all… Do you know how to improve it to increase performance?
In this post, we tell you everything you need to know to optimize your online project. Let’s get on with it!
How to know the loading speed? Let’s talk about Google Insights
To find out what the loading time of a website is, Google launched Page Speed: a software that allows a complete diagnosis of everything that affects the page speed of a website.
But in addition to showing the loading speed, this program informs about the improvements that must be madeto a certain website to optimize its performance.
Although most of them have to do with technical SEO issues, they also include other variables that affect the user experience, such as security, fluidity, or accessibility.
Using Google Page Speed is easy. You just have to enter the URL of the web and, in a few seconds, the tool performs an in-depth diagnosis. Diagnosis that quantifies by means of a score in which 100 is the highest value, that is, obtaining a 100 means that we are facing a perfectly optimized website.
After the diagnosis, the tool provides various useful information:
- Overall web score.
- Summary of suggestions:
- In green it shows those variables that have been worked properly and that, for the moment, do not need modifications.
- In yellow it informs about the variables that it would be convenient to modify in the short or medium term.
- In red, the factors that require urgent improvement, since they are negatively affecting the user experience and the SEO of the website.
Obviously, getting a 100% Google Page Speed score would be the ultimate goal for many websites. However, do not obsess over this score, as getting the maximum does not guarantee first place in the SERPs.
Other variables also enter here, such as the actions of your competition, mobile speed, security, citations from other sites, etc.
Best Practices for Optimizing Page Speed
Next, we give you a series of practical tips to improve page speed.
responsive design
Although responsive design is mainly oriented to the aesthetic and visual part, it is also important to improve page speed.
The mobile contents are lighter than those that are loaded on the computer, which avoids the loading of certain information and achieves a higher speed.
Create an MPA
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) are pages created by Google with the aim of speeding up the loading of websites on mobile devices.
If you are about to create a content website, choose this type of page. If you already have it created, you use WordPress and you don’t want to change all the codes, we recommend you install the AMP for WP plugin, or the official AMP Project Contributors plugin.
But yes, for an optimal integration you will need the support of a custom development (we can help you with this 😉
Optimize images
Images are extremely important to capture the user’s attention and improve the visual fluidity of a website. However, abusing them or not optimizing them correctly can seriously affect loading time.
Keep in mind that reducing the weight does not mean reducing the quality of the image and, in fact, there are tools and image compressors such as Optimizilla, JPEGmini or Trimage that help you optimize the images on your website without reducing their quality. Either manually or directly.
Defer loading images
When accessing a web page, be it from any device, not all the images on it are seen from the first moment, right? The user must scroll or enter certain sections to reach them little by little.
Well, it is highly recommended to prioritize the loading of images based on the order in which they are going to be viewed, so that they are loaded as the user scrolls through the web. If you have a WordPress, we recommend the Lazy Load tool.
Web compression
Instead of showing the user the full web page, today’s browsers are programmed to offer a smaller, compressed version.
If you use the gzip compressor, you can reduce its size by up to 90%, something that does not necessarily affect the user experience and can minimize the loading time.
Avoid redirects
Every time a user needs to be redirected to another landing page, web processing stops, adding a few milliseconds to the load time.
To avoid redirects, we advise you to bet for a responsive design, something that guarantees a correct user experience, regardless of the device where the user is.
Finally, an audit of internal links to detect those that have a redirection will also suffice not only to reduce loading times, but also to transfer the calculation for positioning more efficiently.
In short, we recommend you use the Google Page Speed Insight tool and apply these practical tips to optimize the performance of your website. Remember that at Doowebs we have the best specialists in web development and optimization. If you want to receive personalized attention… Contact us! We will be happy to help you.