How to Speed Up Your Website’s Loading Speed

Spoiled by high-speed internet, modern users are accustomed to the fact that pages open instantly. Therefore, if your site is loading for more than 4 seconds and “slows down”, users do not wait and go to other resources.

Together with the employees of the SEO department of Exiterra.com Digital Agency, we will answer the questions: “What is website loading speed and what does it affect?” We will also tell you how to speed up website loading without big losses.

What is it?

Of course, the original content will make the user wait for the site to load. If the page contains useful information that is not on other resources, then users will wait, even if it takes a minute, which is considered an eternity by the current parameters.

But, such content is possessed by single resources, so the issue of accelerated loading of Internet pages is relevant for all site owners.

Financial losses.

It is important for online stores and commercial resources, which may lose their profit due to low download speeds. It is believed that visitors to commercial sites leave them if they take more than 5–7 seconds to load (although these numbers are, of course, relative), going to competitors for information.

For those who are not pursuing commercial goals, this metric may seem unnecessary, but the first impression of a site depends largely on how quickly it loads.

Loading speed for website promotion.

Faster website loading is important not only in terms of retaining and attracting a new audience but also for getting priority positions in search results. Yandex, Google, and other search engines take this factor into account, and first of all show users high-speed sites, giving the slowest the least advantageous positions in the ranking.

THE EXEMPLARY SPEED OF LOADING SITE PAGES IS 1–2 SECONDS, GOOD — 3 SECONDS, ACCEPTABLE — 4–6 SECONDS. THE “SLOW” SITES INCLUDE THOSE THAT ARE LOADED FOR 10 OR MORE SECONDS.

What determines the website’s speed?

The loading speed of the site also depends on the device on which it is viewed. On laptops and desktops, the speed should reach the limit, and on smartphones, it can be slower. For example, if a website loads in 3 seconds on a laptop, then on a smartphone this indicator will be 4–5 seconds.

Speed up through content.

In order to make the site faster, you need to free it from “heavy” content and compress the images.

1. Compress images.

For example, if the site contains photos of 1–2 MB in size, reduce them to 300–500 kb, the difference in quality will not be felt. You can reduce the weight of the image using free online resources. Since photos take up half the weight of most pages, your site’s speed will increase dramatically. As a rule, sites with a 1-second index do not have images larger than 500 kb.

To speed up the loading of the site, you do not need to post images in FullHD and in other complex and heavy formats. For non-commercial resources, they may be suitable, but for those who work in Internet commerce and Internet marketing, it is better to use light images and only the necessary content, which cannot be avoided.

Png photos that are five times heavier than Jpeg should be avoided. There are other lightweight image formats such as WebP and Avif, but not all browsers support them.

2. Heavy content.

Placing heavy content (video, music, and animation) on a website also directly affects its loading speed. Therefore, it is better to post on the site a video pre-uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, and other video hosting sites, and a link to music from Spotify and other streaming platforms.

3. Site weight.

Remove unnecessary plugins and scripts that take up RAM and reduce the size of the HTML code, which should not exceed 200 kb.

Don’t get carried away with animation and unnecessary visual effects. Use services to clean files from unnecessary data. Use Gzip to compress your second and third needs files into an archive. The lighter the site is, the faster it will “fly” in the digital space of the Internet!

Increase speed with load-scripts.

Lazy loading can improve the speed of a site when images and videos do not appear on the Internet page immediately, but as the user scrolls to them. Or in general, until the visitor clicks on the photo or video, they will not load on the site.

Lazy loading is used to increase loading speed on sites that host heavy images, but it will help other sites as well.

Reducing the distance between the server location and the target audience’s devices will help solve this problem.

You can also use content delivery networks — these are servers united in different parts of the world into one network that accelerate the delivery of content to the target audience’s habitat, such as Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, Incapsula, and others.

Browser to speed up downloading.

A proven way to speed up a website is by using the browser cache. This operation allows when the site is first loaded, some static files to be saved in the users’ browsers.

The further you visit the site, it will load faster for visitors since these files will already be stored in their browsers. Perhaps the first visit to the site, at the same time, will be slow, but subsequent visits will be faster.

In order to properly configure caching on the site, you need to configure the HTTP Expires templates and write the required script in the .htaccess file.

How and where to check the website’s speed.

You can check the website loading speed on several free services.

PageSpeed ​​Insights from Google is popular. Here you can test the speed of the site on mobile devices and computers, get an estimate of the speed in points (a result from 90 points is considered exemplary, from 50 to 90 — normal, less than 50 points — unsatisfactory) and recommendations for solving the corresponding problems.

Other similar services — GTMetrix, WebPageTest, Pingdom, and Load Impact, not all of these resources have a Russian-language interface, but each of them offers tips on how to increase the site loading speed.

Using the methods listed in this article will certainly make your site faster and more comfortable to visit, which will lead to an increase in the number of visitors and an improvement in search engine rankings.

But in pursuit of the speed of loading Internet resources, do not forget about the original content. Without it, even the world record for the speed of loading sites is unlikely to be popular.