How to speed up your Website

Set a Goal

Set a goal of where you want to be before delving into working on your site speed. To get an idea of what your site speed should be, Google has collected data from a range of industries. You can see the average load time for industries in the UK below: (other countries can be found here)

Perform a website speed test so you can ascertain how fast your site is currently and how far you are from your goal.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Investing in AMP will give you an immediate 50% uplift in your mobile pages. AMP strips down HTML files resulting in quicker, mobile friendly versions of your site that are accessible even when users have poor internet and data coverage that would otherwise be unavailable or take ages to load. Google also favours AMP in search results.

Website Hosting

When looking at web hosting options always keep in mind that cheaper hosting will almost always result in slow loading times amongst other bugs. This is usually because the cheaper options are shared hosting which means your site will be sharing disc space with other websites. If you would like a fast website, it’s better to choose dedicated hosting which may cost more but will result in quicker loading speeds with better performance and a higher level of security.

Optimize images & videos

Images and videos can have a negative impact on your website’s load speed if they are too large. Always ensure your images and videos are optimised which means decreasing their file size.

Reduce unnecessary external scripts & minimize HTTP requests

HTTP requests are made for every different part of the page including scripts, stylesheets and images. If there are a lot of on-page components this will take longer for the page to render. You can view these requests in google chrome using the developer tools. If you right click on the page, click inspect then under the network tab you will see the names of all the files on that page, the size and the time it takes to load each file. The more requests your site makes to your server the slower it will load. Removing any that are unnecessary will speed up your site.

Reduce redirects

The user will experience additional waiting time for every time a page redirects to another page. If you have several redirects for one page remove the redirects in between the primary URL and destination URL. The additional redirects are unnecessary and contribute to the time spent waiting for the HTTP request response cycle to finish.

Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

When your site experiences a high volume of traffic, each user who is on the site is sending requests to the one server that is hosting your website. When there are high levels of traffic load times for all users are slowed down as the time it takes to process each request increases. Users who are far away from the server your site is hosted on will also experience a slower loading time even if there isn’t a high volume of traffic, purely because the information has a greater distance to travel. You can cache the website on a global network of servers with a CDN which means when a user is on your site the request is sent to the closest server.

Enable browser caching

The very first time a potential customer visits your website their browser needs to download JavaScript files, the HTML document, images and stylesheets before they can use the page. Once the page has finished loading, the various components are then stored in the user’s cache. This means only a few components will need to be downloaded the next time the page is visited by the user resulting in a quicker load time.

Reducing page load times on your website can be time consuming and challenging, however, the hard work will be worth it. It will improve overall site performance and user experience increasing the likeliness of the user becoming your customer.

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