Everyone must have heard the story of a Tortoise and a Rabbit. The moral of the story was slow and steady wins the race. But it is not applicable when it comes to page speed or SEO activities for your website or an application. 

Even a delay in loading the page will pull the interest of the users back and decrease the page-views drastically. The page should not take more than 1 second to load and you might have not more than five seconds to engage the users before they leave the site. 

No matter if you are a customer or a business owner, if you are searching for a relevant answer on the google search engine, you may not want to wait for long, isn’t it?

Similarly, people visiting your website might not like to wait for long to find their answers. There can be nothing worse than slacking. When it comes to site performance, page speed is the crucial aspect and you definitely need a high-speed ride to rank higher. 

However, until you understand how it works, you might find it difficult too. Also, there are multiple factors that influence the process of page speed. 

The digital marketing experts understand that an increasing bounce rate will decrease user engagement. Reducing the bounce rate is important to speed up the loading page smoothly. A website or a mobile app that is optimized for speed will have robust UX and can also be a reason for your search engine rankings. 

However, to keep the site running smoothly with apt loading speed, you also need proficient developers to develop a sturdy website. Hire web developers from a renowned development company to boost the website and increase the user engagement. 

In this article, we will explain what page speed is and various measures to improve the page speed.

Let’s start!

What is Page Loading Speed?

Long things short, page loading speed refers to how quickly the content loads when a user visits the page. Page speed is the loading time of the page that a visitor visits and not referring to the entire website. 

There are a few factors that affect the low page speed, like:

• Number of videos, image size and other media files that are on one page. 
• The plugins that are installed in the website.
• Themes chosen
• Coding and server-side scripts

All of these elements become a sole reason for delayed web page loading speed and in turn the UX becomes low resulting in negative impact of the website and users inclined to click away from them. 

So what are ways to prevent the above factors and improve the page speed? Let us dig into the top seven ways that help increase the speed and enhance the UX. 

7 Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed

Now that we know what factors influence page speed, it’s time to understand how you can improve these and boost your website page loading. With that in mind, let us read the 7 most important ways to speed up the web page. 

Optimize Media Files

Media is the great way to display any information to the users. It is a visual content that users will get attracted to. Unfortunately, if the images and visuals are larger in size with minimum text, they increase the load time. There are a few better ways to compress the images and keep the intent right which will not weigh the site down.

Optimize your images by ensuring they are scaled appropriately and the original size should be replaced with 250×250 pixels. Do not worry the browser will still download the image in its original size with CSS. It will increase the speed 4X of what it needs. 

Alternatively, if you resize the image and show as pixels the image used would be 100 times larger than it should be. Ensure that the resized image is used with the right software to integrate into the mobile app or website. Adobe Photoshop is a popular choice of all the designers to deliver high-quality images. JPEGs are considered as the best format for images and PNGs are suitable for graphics. 

Compress Web Pages

If your site still includes large sized images and videos, the page file will be large too. As we have understood that large sized files lead to slow load time, you need to compress the pages in a zip file and folders if you need to send via email. Compress these webpages without hampering the quality of the images and videos. Adding these gzip compression is the best way to increase the speed.

Reduce Redirects HTTP

Too many interlinks or redirects will degrade the loading time. If you have designed the page with a lot of images, Flash scripts, and transitions, the browser will request each of these components. These redirect requests may lead to down time of the page load. So, where possible, avoid extra features and effects. 

Use CSS for BG images and check the social integration of load time. Also, consider removing the non-essential JS as the browser while trying to load the non-asynchronous JavaScript, it will not load anything else until it’s done. Non-asynchronous JS needs to be removed for better results. 

Keep JS Below the Fold- Minify

If you need JS files on the page, keep them below the fold and allow the rest of the page to load in speed. Keeping the JS below the fold means the portion of the page a user will scroll in order to see the content. For best load time, keep the images file cimple and above the fold to load quickly and shift the JS code somewhere at the bottom. The browser will be able to concentrate on loading the easy content first. 

Reduce Speed with Location

It may only be fractional, but the speed will definitely improve by hosting the website and optimizing the data in the same location as the users. If your target audience is the UK then hosting the site as the web server in the UK is feasible. This means that the request to open the page has to travel shorter than the hosting site in another country. 

Leverage CDN

A content delivery network is referred to as the content network that serves and helps improve the page loading speed. It does this by hosting and delivering content from located servers across the globe. A CDN works as your host. In addition to the server, you can leverage the CDN to provide copies of the files among the chosen data centers. 

This can maximize performance, by reducing the data request distance to travel between browser and servers.  Loading the content on the web page from the server closes each visitor with the help of CDN to reduce network and offer lower TTFBs.

Enable Browser Cache

Browser caching is another way to improve and leverage the page loading speed. This technique enables the browser to store various data that includes stylesheets, images, graphics, and JavaScript files. Hence, it does not have to reload the web page every time a use tries to open the content, 

Similar to W3 Cache, WP Rocket is the powerful caching plugin if you are using a WordPress site. It employs page caching and pre=loading to optimize the speed that creates super speedy loading time. With a premium plugin, you can choose the best plan to enhance the speed time. 

Conclusion- Integrate Quick Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed

In case you are not aware that Google is not focusing on mobile-friendly content these days, let us tell you that it is the most trending thing off late and will not back off anytime soon. Which is why the importance of page loading time should be rectified as soon as possible. 

We all have short time to give attention to something, and with longer duration of page loading the engagement of the user on the page will not last longer. There are plenty of cat videos on the other sites that will help them with the information they need. 

Time is precious and you should not wait for even a second in implementing these seven ways to improve page speed of your website.