Conquering the Page Speed Race: How Do You Transform Your Slow-Paced Website into a Race Car
These days, website speed a.k.a. page speed is an essential factor in seizing a top place in Google searches. The search engine launched initiatives to encourage website owners to speed up their sites for both desktop and mobile searches. Speed is vital since it is also an important in taking hold of a user’s attention—sites that load slowly turns potential users off and encourages them to move to another website. If you do not want that to happen, here’s what you need to do.
How to Amplify Website Speed
Make sure that you are informed with the methods in speeding up page speed. Apply these tips today for maximum SEO advantage.
1. Invest in excellent hosting plans
One of the ways to guarantee that your users will enjoy a high-powered website is to invest in a reliable hosting plan. While standard shared hosting plans allow site owners to save money, what it does though is pack in websites by the thousands into one server. Thus, this leads every homepage to compete for power.
To get into the top ranks of searches, it is best that you splurge in the services of a good hosting company to make sure that your site’s speed and operations are in top form. If you use WordPress, look up into the works of hosting companies like Flywheel and WP Engine.
If you are managing a site other than those from WordPress, you can also upgrade your page to a Virtual Private Server or VPS which helps provide more power to your site. Turning it into a VPS will also allow you to fine-tune the website yourself through updated versions of MySQL, Varnish caching, PHP and a bundle more of new web server tools.
2. Manage a lightweight website
The websites of old cannot compare with today’s websites—they are exceedingly functional and feature eye-catching details. However, all these up-to-the-minute improvements also mean a heavier and larger website.
To avoid this, you need to steer clear of embellishments that your page doesn’t really need. For example, site owners tend to include fancy plugins, larger images, widgets, animation and video backgrounds in their websites to further command users’ attention—however, they can slow down webpages. Hence, you only need to supplement your site with any of those additions if the items are really necessary to your site’s content and navigation.
You can also discard more site weight by doing the following:
• Make frequent database optimization a habit
• Minimizing third-party scripts
• Code compression and minification
• Using a less code-heavy theme
• Optimizing website images
• Decreasing the number of fonts used
• Applying AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
If you manage a WordPress site, you can take advantage of their speed plugins like Imagify and WP Rocket to make those tasks simpler.
3. Take advantage of caching and CDN (Content Delivery Network)
It is time to get technical and know more about what caching and Content Delivery Network can do for your site.
One benefit of caching is that the page’s source code gets pre-assembled on the server thus it gets fully and readily delivered to the browser in just one attempt. Caching comes in different kinds and levels and the process can be applied by means of the hosting company, plugins or through CDN.
CDNs provide not only caching but they are also capable of hosting copies of pre-produced site code on an ensemble of servers throughout the world. This leads to a reduction on the effect of physical distance between the user and server during loading time.
For WordPress site users, you can utilize plugins like Imagify or WP Rocket to do this.
4. Optimize site for current Core Web Vital metrics
Implementing optimization according to Core Web Vital metrics will help gain speed for your website. These metrics include the following:
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
This concept refers to the distracting movement on a page caused by another element that’s currently loading. This issue is often caused by poor page-painting.
• FID (First Input Delay)
This describes the interval that transpires between the first action of the user and the browser’s capability to react to it.
• LCP (Large Contentful Paint)
This concept describes the painting of a page’s biggest element. If you want to know which element is believed to be the LCP item in your page, you can make use of the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google.
As a website owner, it is your duty to check the best SEO practices and take advantage of tools and concepts which will help improve your site and attract potential clients. The methods explained in this article will surely get your homepage’s speed on track. It is possible that you can still manage a lightweight, speedier site while at the same time, retain a good-looking one.