How to do Website Page Speed Optimization in 2023

The website serves as an entry point for any type of sales and conversion for your organisation as the digital world continues to alter our behaviour. The website’s speed influences whether or not a user will complete the desired action on the page.

As a result, learning how to optimise website performance is critical, as it might result in a poor user experience. Website speed is one of the ranking variables in Google’s PageSpeed upgrade.

We want to highlight some of the most effective tools and approaches for website speed optimization that SEO professionals can use in this article.

What is website speed?

Site Speed refers to how quickly a browser can load webpages from a given site

When a user clicks on the URL that sends them to your site, site speed refers to how quickly your website reacts. Site speed is an important indicator for users’ speedy access to products, information, and services, according to Google PageSpeed criteria.

Website speed
Website speed

Website Speed Optimization Tools

Various free online tools, such as GTMetrix, Google Pagespeed Insights, WebPageTest, Test my Site by Think with Google, and others, can be used to assess site speed. Let’s take a closer look at each tool.

Website Speed Optimization Tools
Website Speed Optimization Tools

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1. GT Metrix

It is one of the most dependable tools for testing and improving the load speed of a website. It gives a thorough examination of all the elements that influence load time.

I prefer to use this tool because it delivers useful information. There’s a whole study on how to use various technical parameters to enhance website load time if you scroll down.

GTMETRIX
GTMETRIX

2. Pagespeed Insights

If you want to find out how a specific webpage performs in terms of load time, Google’s page speed insights is the best solution. Pagespeed Insights explains how to reduce the time it takes for a page to load.

The nicest aspect about utilising this tool is that it is a Google open-source tool that gives you access to all of Google’s supporting materials, which will assist you in finding and fixing faults to enhance site speed according to Google’s best practises.

PagespeedInsights
PagespeedInsights

3. WebPage Test

The WebPage Test application provides an in-depth examination on how to improve your website’s performance. It contains suggestions for how to improve website speed even at the network level, taking into account user network capacity, connectivity, and location. It also allows you to choose the server location from which you wish to evaluate the performance of your website.

4. Test My Site: Think with Google

Test my site is the finest alternative if you’re looking for a tool that’s specially built to measure mobile site speed.

It allows you to download the report and undertake a more in-depth study. Test My Site is the most dependable tool for speed optimization and analysis.

Simply type the URL of your website into the search box and hit Enter; your website performance report will appear in seconds.

Think with Google
Think with Google

5. Gift of Speed

One of my favourite tools for evaluating website speed is Gift of Speed. This application also offers website performance optimization services in addition to speed measurement measures.

This application also allows you to test the speed of a website from various locations across the world.

How to improve website loading speed?

Let’s look at the best ways for optimising website speed now that we’ve discussed several methods for measuring site speed.

improve website loading speed
improve website loading speed

‣ Optimize images

The best technique is to compress the image before submitting it to the server. Website visuals are crucial in the case of e-commerce. The usage of images on product pages increases user engagement. Images larger than 100 kb take a long time to load, slowing down the overall page pace.

To reduce image size, use the gzip compression approach. The image size is reduced by 70% using Gzip compression. Check out our 7 Image Optimization Tips for more information on optimization.

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‣ Use CDN

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed system of network servers that stores multiple copies of websites in different geographical locations. CDN aids in the delivery of content requests to users from the closest server location; as a result, server load time is significantly lowered.

‣ Remove unused CSS

CSS is used to make your website look nice. According to UnusedCSS.com, 35% of the CSS used on a website is never used. Identifying and eliminating unneeded CSS files would be a wonderful way to enhance website speed. This programme may be used to locate and compress unnecessary CSS files.

‣ Minify JS and CSS files

JavaScript is an interactive website design element. The number of https queries to the server increases as the number of JavaScript files increases.

Minifying JS and CSS files reduces the number of blank spaces and removes unnecessary comments. It also aids in the abbreviation of function names and classes.

Using minification techniques reduces code byte size, requiring less data to be downloaded and, as a result, reducing page load time.

Best minification tools :

  • Try HTMLMinifier to minify HTML.
  • Try CSSNano and CSS to minify CSS.
  • Use Uglify to minify JavaScript.

‣ Make proper use of Web fonts

When it comes to website design, readability, and accessibility, typography is crucial. Using the right Webfont ensures that you adhere to Google’s best practises. Each font is treated as a separate resource that must be downloaded. When fonts are used incorrectly, the rendering of a website can become clogged, resulting in a longer load time.

The following is a list of web fonts that can be used based on browser compatibility.

  • To browsers that support WOFF 2.0, serve a WOFF 2.0 variation.
  • To the vast majority of browsers, serve the WOFF variation.
  • Serve a TTF variation to older Android browsers (below 4.4).
  • Serve an EOT variation to older Internet Explorer browsers (below IE9).

‣ Use Prefetching techniques

As the name implies, in this technique, resources are preloaded or rendered prior to user demand, saving time in the loading process.

When a visitor enters a website after clicking on a link, for example, some content and links are already preloaded. To employ this strategy, we must anticipate a user’s behaviour and organise our website operations accordingly.

The following is a list of commonly used Prefetching techniques:

‣ DNS – Prefetching

The domain name is resolved in advance before the user takes any action in this method. Domains such as Google analytics, Google fonts, Google maps, CDN, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others can be prefetched, for example.

‣ Link Prefetching

This strategy is utilised on a website with a consistent user journey. Users travel from the product page to the shopping cart page on an e-commerce website, for example.

Note: Before implementing these strategies, it’s critical to conduct a thorough user behaviour analysis on the website.

‣ Reduce excessive DOM Size

The document object model, or DOM, is a stand-alone interface for HTML and XML documents. Unnecessary big DOM trees are sometimes formed as a result of improper coding approaches, which slows down the website’s performance.

The ideal DOM size, according to Google’s developer handbook, is

  • There are less than 1500 nodes in total.
  • A maximum depth of 32 nodes is possible.
  • With more than 60 child nodes, this is a parent node.

The Lighthouse tool is a great way to see if your website has an excessive DOM size problem. This is how the lighthouse report detects the issue of excessive DOM size.

‣ Implement lazy loading

Implement lazy loading
Implement lazy loading

Lazy loading is a powerful approach for reducing the time it takes for a website to load. Only the desired component of the website is loaded in this website speed optimization strategy, and the rest is left unchanged until the user requests that component.

According to a study provided by macmetrics, after applying lazy loading, the page load time was drastically reduced.

Conclusion

Optimization of a website’s speed is a difficult task. Every company wishes to achieve the optimal website speed. A consumer expects a web page to load in three seconds, according to Google.

To meet the goal, SEO professionals must conduct a complete study to find critical action points; otherwise, we risk losing organic traffic and money.
The techniques discussed in this article on how to improve website performance will assist you in achieving your target page speed, but we must consider the time it will take for the website developer to apply the advice.

We must also examine the reports generated by website speed optimization tools in order to find crucial indicators that affect the website’s load time. Our priority should be to concentrate on these important factors and try to resolve them.

Digital Universe’s SEO services may be the greatest option for you if you’re not sure what you’re doing or where to begin.

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