How To Improve Page Speed: Proven Ways That Work

Every business wants its website to be fast. No one enjoys a slow website, especially when it’s your own. Not only does it make for a frustrating user experience, but it can also impact your bottom line. Page speed is one of the most important aspects of a website. Reports and developments have shown that page speed is a critical factor in SEO and can influence whether or not someone converts to your site. This blog post will discuss different ways to improve page speed and why it matters.

Different and proven ways to improve page speed

There are many different ways to improve page speed. We will outline a few of the most effective methods below.

1. Optimize images: One way to improve page speed is to optimize your images. This can be done by compressing them or choosing the correct file format. Another way to improve page speed is to use a caching plugin. This will allow your website’s visitors to load pages from their browser’s cache, which will result in faster loading times. You can also minify your CSS and JavaScript files, reducing their size and making them load faster.
2. Choose a good web hosting: Another thing you can do is choose a good web host when you look into buying from a domain brokerage. A good web host will have servers that are optimized for WordPress sites. They will also have fast response times and handle high traffic.
3. Use a caching plugin: The last thing you can do is to use a caching plugin, which will cache your website’s content so that it loads faster for visitors who are visiting for the first time or returning after an extended period away from the site. This will result in less server space being used up and fewer requests made to load pages on your site. A caching plugin is a tool that saves a copy of your website’s content on people’s computers. This way, when they come back to your website, the content doesn’t have to be downloaded again. This makes your website faster for them to load.
4. Use a content delivery network (CDN): Another way to improve page speed is to use a CDN. A CDN stores copies of your website’s static files on servers worldwide. When someone visits your website, their browser will download the file from the closest server to them instead of your primary server. This will result in faster loading times for people visiting from different countries or who have slower internet connections.
5. Enable browser caching: The last thing you can do is enable browser caching, which will save a copy of the website’s content on people’s computers. This way, when they return to your website again, later on, their computer won’t have to download it all over again, and load times will be faster for them.
6. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS: Another way to improve page speed is to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS. This can be done by using the asynchronous loading attribute or a plugin like loadCSS.

Why bother to improve page speed?

There are many reasons why you should bother to improve page speed. We will outline just a few of them below.

1. SEO: One reason is that page speed is critical in SEO. Google has repeated time and time that they consider site speed when ranking websites. In fact, they have even created a tool called PageSpeed Insights, which helps website owners measure their website’s performance and find ways to improve it. 
2. User experience: Another reason is that people don’t like slow websites. If your website loads slowly, they probably won’t stick around to see what it has to offer and will leave in search of one that loads faster. This means you’re losing out on potential customers or readers who might have been interested in what you had to say if only your website hadn’t taken so long for them to load. 
3. Conversion: Page speed also matters when it comes time for someone visiting your site to decide whether they want to buy something from you or sign up for an email list (or whatever other action). A slow page can lead visitors away from the conversion path before they get there because their patience runs out while waiting for everything else on the page to finish loading first. 
4. Lower bounce rate: The last reason you should improve page speed is that it reduces your bounce rate, which will also help with SEO. This means that it is tracked when someone visits your site once but then leaves without clicking anything or spending much time there (known as a “bounce”). Google won’t think that same person came back again later for another visit after seeing how fast everything loaded up quickly during their first visit earlier in the day. So, suppose they never come across any other pages on your site while browsing around today (and this is a common occurrence on slow websites). In that case, your website will look like it’s not very popular (even if that’s not the case), and you’ll rank lower as a result.
5. Overall better user experience: Finally, having a fast website makes for a much better overall user experience. People don’t like waiting around for things to load, and they especially don’t appreciate it when their browser crashes because too many scripts run at once or when images won’t load properly. So, by following some of the tips mentioned in this post, you can improve page speed and make your visitors happier in the process.

What works and what doesn’t

What doesn’t usually work when improving page speed is using lazy loading or making your website responsive. While both things can help in some instances, they’re not always effective solutions. Lazy loading, for example, can be unpredictable because it depends on how much content is visible on the screen when someone first visits your site. 

If they scroll down right away and the majority of the page isn’t loaded yet, then some elements that were supposed to lazy load might not even appear until after they’ve scrolled back up. This can confuse and make the website look broken to some people. And as we mentioned earlier, responsiveness often causes problems with images not loading correctly.

However, some things that do work well are using caching plugins like WP Super Cache or WPRocket and minifying JavaScript and CSS files. These two methods have been shown to help improve page speed quite a bit in most cases. 

So, if you’re looking for a way to speed up your website and make it faster, then these two things are probably worth trying out. Remember that not all plugins will work on every host or server configuration, so some experimentation may be necessary before finding one that works best with your setup.