Why is website speed important?

Website speed is one of the important factors in SERPs. Search engine prompt websites rank higher if web pages’ loading speeds are fast. Website pages loading in 3-5 seconds is a remarkably good speed score. However, if you want to rank first on the search engine’s result then the website’s page must be loaded in 1.5 seconds. Search engines favour fast loading pages because they’re a sign of a quality user experience. A fast site speed will result in a better user experience, while a slower speed will result in a poor user experience. Studies show that 74% would abandon mobile websites that don’t load within 5 seconds, meaning you could lose 70% of your revenue. Luckily, this can be changed.

How to check your website speed?

1. Google’s website speed checker tool

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

This insights tool will help you track your website speed performance.

2. GTMetrix is also a well-known website to check performance and monitor it.

https://gtmetrix.com/

3. Pingdom is useful for tracking website performance.

https://www.pingdom.com/

Methods to improve your website speed performance

Marvel Websites presents easy methods to improve your website’s speed performance. If you follow it, then you will achieve a higher speed score than average websites.

1. Website Hosting

Poor quality website hosting makes your website speed slow. Always host your website on a powerful hosting server. Contact us to know more about the hosting that is suitable for your website. There are many hosting plans available with different features. You can refer to them on https://marvelwebsites.net/

2. Plugins

Many WordPress plugins add more functionality to the website. People often maintain their websites on their own and install too many plugins on the website. Few plugins are not optimized well and will slow down the website performance.

Each plugin in the repository has different functions and features. Some of them make database calls, while others load front-end assets. The plugins that make a lot of database queries and require a lot of assets to load will slow down your load time. If everything is done properly, then you won’t find any negative effect on load time. But few plugins will call many HTTP requests during the page rendering. This may result in a slow website opening. Always think before installing any plugins on your WordPress website.

3. External Services and Advertising

Selling your website space to third party advertisers drastically slow down webpage loading speed. Too many ads or slow loading ads make website loading speed poor and increase the bounce rate. This inversely affects your website’s marketability. External services bring two problems with them. The first being website loading, it will stop until external resources respond. If websites have too many external services, web pages need to load all of them and wait for responses from external service on each page. The more calls you have, the more you wait, the higher the load on the web server. In some cases, the page load will wait until the data transfer is completed between your site and the external service. If the service is called in the header and there is a service interruption, your page will simply refuse to load.

4. Image Optimization

Images are an essential tool to improve a website’s visualization. The blend of typography and image is the key to success in website design. Most of the websites have images and the majority of web page speed problems come from the images. The website’s page must be properly resized, it should be the same size taken from the webpage. You can use Photoshop for resizing the images. Do not use high quality photos, always use optimized 60-80 quality jpeg images on the website. It will not affect visualization.

5. Lightweight WordPress Theme

WordPress themes with a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons and many more shiny elements are immensely appealing to the eye. But remember this: if they have too many elements and higher page sizes, then they will definitely cause your web server to take a whooping.

6. Use minify Js, CSS and HTML

Minify means removing extra spaces, comments and other unnecessary elements from the coding file. You can use https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/ plugin to minify JS, CSS and HTML.

7. Enable GZIP

Compressing on a local disk can save a lot of space on the hard disk. Similarly for web traffic, GZIP compression is used. This will reduce the bandwidth usage and deliver the content to the browser faster from the web server. You can enable GZIP compression by adding the following code in the .htaccess file.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

8. Cleanup WordPress Database

Deleting unwanted data from the database will help to keep its size to a minimum and reduce the size of the backup. You can reduce the database size by deleting the spam comments, fake users, unnecessary drafts, extra themes and unwanted plugins. By doing this, you will reduce the size of the website’s file size and database, and this way you can increase the speed of the website.