Several studies prove that website speed interrelates with other key metrics. For example, according to a recent study by Portent , a B2B site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate that's three times higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds. Each additional second of load time steepens that difference in conversion rate, as seen in the chart below.

When looking at overall goal conversion rates instead of ecommerce conversions, the dropoff of conversions is much steeper as sites get slower, according to Portent. After that, you can expect roughly half the conversion rate of lightning-fast websites.

Your hosting provider, images, JavaScript and CSS files, and web fonts are just a few factors that can impact your website speed. To get the fastest website possible, you can optimize all these factors by following the steps below.

While not exhaustive, this list will form a comprehensive optimization strategy. To start, you can use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights. It will assess your Core Web Vitals on mobile by default or desktop and let you know if you passed.

Here's an example for Forbes. Your assessment should also include actual experience: access your website from multiple devices and see what the experience feels like. Is it seamless and speedy, or cumbersome and clunky? The more data you have about how your site performs, the better your ability to identify and implement key fixes.

But even if you had unlimited resources and time, we wouldn't recommend this approach. Instead, try to prioritize potential fixes based on what matters most to your visitors. For example, if your site takes a significant amount of time to start loading, focus your efforts on server-side concerns such as hosting provider problems or DNS issues.

This takes priority even if the content on your site also struggles to deliver at speed — because visitors won't stick around to see your content if the page itself takes long to load.

You can also use the recommendations and diagnostics provided by speed testing tools, like PageSpeed Insights, to help prioritize your optimization efforts. For example, when looking at the list below, you would prioritize reducing main-thread work — the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS — over avoiding large layout shifts.

It can give users faster-loading websites that respond more efficiently to user interactions, which helps your business boost user satisfaction and search engine rankings. As noted above, your hosting provider could be a potential source of speed problems.

While several factors could contribute to speed issues, including the geographical location of your provider, their physical infrastructure and the overall bandwidth of their network connection, the type of web hosting your website is using can also impact performance.

When all data required to fully load your site is stored in one place, initial and ongoing load times suffer.

This issue will only heighten as internet and data service providers continue to experience dramatic growth in internet traffic worldwide. Content delivery networks CDNs can help. They use multiple servers to store replications of your content across multiple locations.

When users visit your site, the CDN chooses the server or servers closest to their physical location to optimize content delivery. Image Source. CDNs are becoming increasingly popular. According to the HTTP Archive , the median weight of images on a web page on desktop is over 1, KB!

PNG and. TinyPG is just one example. Instead of using one of the image formats above and running them through an image compression tool, you could use the WebP format. This format provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images. The problem? More redirects mean more load on the server, which can increase loading time.

As your site grows, these HTTP requests start to stack up and eventually create a noticeable delay between user click-throughs and actual page loading. The good news is that many of the strategies in this guide, like using a CDN and minifying CSS and JS files, can help limit the number of HTTP requests you site makes.

Learn more about reducing your website's HTTP requests. The more you can reduce file sizes without compromising quality, the better your website performance. One of the most robust and reliable compression frameworks is Gzip, but other methods can also deliver reduced file sizes without impacting the user experience.

If your CMS doesn't offer this feature, then consider installing a caching plugin. The SiteGround Optimizer plugin is a great choice for an all-in-one optimization plugin, offering plenty of features for caching, image compression, frontend optimizations, and other features that can significantly speed up any WordPress website.

It's free and easy to use, and comes packed with premium features such as CSS, JavaScript and HTML minificaiton, GZIP compression, and several options for caching. Solve for errors by running free, external tools to track down outcomes and remove dead links. According to data from Statista , the number of mobile internet users in the United States in amounted to That number is expected to grow to Not only are more people using mobile devices to access the internet — more people are using it as their preferred device type.

According to data from a HubSpot survey of over web traffic analysts in the U. And in the retail segment, some websites load as fast as Google — page load times as low as 1 second!

Strikingly fast, perhaps a bit Google-like focus on page speed and website responsiveness. That, however, is the average page load time of 16 of the top multichannel retailers reaping the rewards of an insanely-fast mobile website and thereby yielding multi-billion dollar revenue figures from mobile customers.

For those uber-geeks taking mobile Web development matters into their own hands, the non-profit World Wide Web Consortium W3C provides a handful of best practices here and here. And for business owners employing Web developers to design highly responsive and speed-optimized mobile websites here are 60 Awesome Web Development Tools that may help you , the improvements should be sought in the following three ingredients of mobile website anatomy:.

Customers appreciate fast responding websites and ultra-low page load times. Mobile technology and the innovation coming along with increasing reliance on smartphones and tablets are showing no signs of slowing down. Top online retailers understand the need to deliver website content efficiently from Web servers to the tiny real estate of mobile screens.

Getting it right with thoroughly designed websites dedicated to mobile platforms enables customers to make quick and educated purchase decisions that ultimately create never-ending revenue streams for online businesses.

And if you still plan to overlook mobile website performance, you might want to reconsider the opportunities and success otherwise achievable mostly with a dedicated, speed-optimized mobile website. O nline marketplaces — like battlegrounds of the ancient Greeks — are high-stake competitive platforms where only the most diligent survive.

And as with all high-stakes battles, human factors decision errors, blunders, and ignorance contribute significantly toward the outcome of online business competitions.

Yet, online businesses and webmasters responsible for maintaining high-performance and fully-optimized websites tend to overlook crucial web design elements that cripple site load times.

And the consequences are usually as hazardous as the Trojan Horse penetrating through fortified defenses and taking full control over the City of Troy, despite the size and dominion of the Trojan Army. Competition for online business success is just as intense if only a bit less violent.

The fight for customer attention boils down to delivering the requested content most efficiently and accurately, irrespective of the company size and past laurels. And just like human blunders and ignorance dictating the outcome of the Trojan War, common mistakes killing website performance tend to determine the outcome of online business competition — fastest to the finish line wins the race!

The aptly named Gap of Death, the interval between expected page load time of under 2 seconds and average site load time of 5 seconds expands or contracts due to surprisingly neglected website optimization tactics and business decisions. Contrary to the popular sentiment, speed optimization is ideally implemented across all stages of website development, and not just after building the entire site, which is only when website owners realize the need to push for website performance optimization.

Final tweaks and speed optimization add-ons implemented after developing websites does improve page speed though, bringing down the load time to at least reach the Gap of Death.

But even within this performance zone, conversion rates go down by 7 percent for each second of delay after the expected page load time of 2 seconds. On the other hand, website owners wary of speed optimization tactics can aim for higher website performance by avoiding the following deadly mistakes as well:.

The mistake of opting for a mediocre Web hosting service can live forever. With over 1. Global availability of a vast array of hosting options is pushing businesses and hobbyists to establish their presence in the cyber world. The demand for cost-effective web hosting services is rising exponentially, and hosting providers are more than willing to compromise service quality in accumulating market share with low-cost tiers.

Mediocre web hosts selling cost-effective services continue to maximize profitability by hosting thousands of websites on single instances of bloated Apache stacks. Un-optimized servers running thousands of public websites on a single server stack is particularly harmful to ecommerce websites characterized by uncontrollable web traffic spikes, multimedia content and large website files.

Attractive website performance is critical to the success of ecommerce businesses since websites taking more than 3 seconds to load immediately lose 40 percent of the traffic.

Perhaps then, investing time and money in pursuing the highest quality web hosting services is key to maintaining high-performance websites generating vast revenue streams by attracting visitor attention efficiently and accurately.

Website speed optimization is an ongoing and evolving process and goes well beyond subscribing to the best web hosting services in the world. Some business decisions intended to maximize revenue by altering website design and features adversely affect website performance by stealing size-able chunks from the bandwidth allotted to each individual visitor.

Additional features and functionality always pleases website owners and developers. Widgets and plugins enable convenient changes to existing websites along with a slight burden on website performance. On a clients site, we saw that it added KB to the overall page weight, which is not good!

Keeping add-ons limited to a bare minimum is essential to maintaining optimum website performance — even plugins installed to the same website core compete in delivering the quickest response to browser requests, ultimately draining bandwidth.

Sometimes the quality and functionality of plugins installed matters far more than the number itself. Plugins that query large streams of data to perform complex operations should do this off-server, and not within website hosting environments such as WordPress. Tempting as it may seem, selling too much real estate to third-party advertisers drastically degrades website performance.

Too many ads or slow loading ads drive bounce rates and negatively impact online marketability. The financial losses that come with high bounce rates outweigh the monetary benefits of handing over vast website spaces to advertisers.

External services typically bring with them two problems. One is brought about by sheer volume, the other has to do with waiting until they load. According to one research study , the cost of generating revenue with a banner advertisement is almost 33 percent of additional latency.

Intrusive pop-up ads further aggravate visitors into abandoning websites at even higher rates. Affiliate code, even just those few additional lines of script take up valuable memory space on the hosting environment and require additional processing cycles in delivering the content to end-users.

Nevertheless, online advertisement is the primary source of income for many online businesses think Google and Facebook! Tempting website design themes and multimedia content are head turners for online traffic.

That is if the content even reaches the eyes of impatient visitors fast enough. High-quality images and videos large pixels, large file size take longer in downloading onto requesting browsers, whereas low quality, lightweight graphics barely capture user attention despite their lower load times.

However, graphics intensive content is not always the deciding factor in driving conversions and sales. This is especially true for ecommerce websites that must contain fast-loading product images and videos describing the value of products, and not necessarily their visual beauty.

Compatibility issues also affect multimedia and application performance for certain browsers and geographic locations. Take Google Chrome and Shockwave Flash as an example.

The two rarely play nice to each other. Similarly, government restrictions can also prevent specific multimedia content from reaching local visitors. Websites with non-functional multimedia content take excessive client-server communication cycles to reach requesting browsers, ultimately deteriorating website performance.

It is, however, up to website owners to ensure streamlined serviceability across all browser platforms, device form factors and geographic locations as government policies and browser compatibility potentially changes over time, and most often, unpredictability as well. Fast loading and fully functional multimedia content is necessary for ecommerce merchants to keep hold of website visitors.

Every second of delay in page load time leads to frustrated visitors abandoning slow websites, and drawing along 7 percent loss in conversion rates , 11 percent fewer page views and 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction. Sign up forms and analytics code add only a few lines to website core files.

But when too many single-lines of code take space on the website back-end, web content assets and plugins with lengthy code end up competing for tiny memory spaces in short processing cycles. As a result, the popular physics phenomenon of non-linearity kicks in, and each component performs unpredictably, usually consuming more processing cycles than expected.

From the perspective of end users, excessive services are often unnecessary or at most, considered secondary to the actual content portrayed by the website. Many websites host more than 80 assets images, plugins, add-ons and other multimedia content , and all of this content is not necessarily delivered to requesting browsers as per user preferences.

Additional investments in developing media-rich websites ultimately backfire when the information actually requested to reach end-users is held by irrelevant sign-up forms, analytics code and other content adding unnecessary weight to the website. Global smartphone subscription is expected to surpass the 2.

The competition to capture the attention of mobile users is even more intense due to slow loading mobile websites and lower visitor patience levels. And on average, 3 in 4 people will abandon a mobile website if it takes any longer than 5 seconds to load, whereas an average mobile takes even longer periods of seconds to load.

Excessive delays in mobile page load time occur mostly when websites are not specifically optimized and designed to deliver high performance on a mobile device interface. Even with dedicated smartphone-optimized pages, mobile users are not always redirected to the intended mobile-versions of desktop website pages requested from mobile browsers.

Redirects are instructions that send users seeking one website URL to another one that supposedly contains the exact information requested by users. Redirects are most effective for mobile users searching for desktop versions of website pages that must be mapped well to equivalent mobile versions in delivering the best mobile website experience.

Doing so inaccurately keeps users from switching between unwanted website files until they reach the right one. This causes unnecessary delays in loading the information actually sought by end-users.

Website owners are eventually responsible for losing competitive advantages in the mobile space when the mobile web traffic is simply redirected toward irrelevant desktop website version, instead of delivering a speed-optimized mobile solution for mobile visitors.

Websites not speed-optimized for mobile devices suffer from common issues hampering mobile user experience. Issues such as faulty redirects, unplayable videos, bloated images and graphics, irrelevant cross-linking and unnecessary assets delivered to mobile visitors degrade website performance and ultimately drive bounce rates.

Only 10 percent of the waiting period is defined by the HTML response to browser requests, and the remaining 90 percent of the delay is caused in rendering pages, parsing HTML, executing code scripts and retrieving embedded assets.

Website performance overhaul with optimization tools and script tweaks can scrape off sizeable chunks from page load times, but perhaps not as effectively as developing a speed optimized website from scratch. And the latter is more of a marketing strategy, a business decision and slight awareness in avoiding the most common mistakes that can potentially ruin online businesses by killing website performance.

W eb traffic and search engine ranking is primarily a vanity metric for website performance. Important as they are, neither is more indicative of online business success than sales figures and conversion rates. Putting things into perspective, ecommerce websites with almost zero percent bounce rate, 15 percent conversion rates and 10, unique website visitors from low search engine rankings fare far better than high ranking sites enjoying , unique visits with only 0.

The debate of conversion rate optimization can carry on for encyclopedic lengths, and implementing business best-practices on Frankensteinish websites can take tons of investments with efforts of patient execution spanning across months before any significant conversion rate improvement is yielded.

Online businesses focusing on improving website performance experience immediate results in the form of higher conversion rates and sky-rocketing sales. Page speed, in particular, fills the void in enhancing marketability by improving website user experience to keep impatient online customers engaged and satisfied.

The staggering statistics are as follows:. These statistics only describe how page speed impacts business success in the competitive cyberspace. The pursuit for speed optimized website begins with identifying critical front-end issues most apparent under standard website performance testing processes.

Before the exploration for page speed bumps begins, understanding the behavior of the most impactful website speed performance indicators helps to accurately identify performance loopholes in websites. Downloading tons of memory hogging website content within milliseconds of initiating browser requests is not entirely possible without a thorough revamp and speed optimization of slow websites.

In many cases, visitors only seek the primary information in the form of content or product information portrayed by Web pages.

Add a lot of complementary graphics and website features, and page rendering times rise beyond measure. Keeping the initial page speed high keeps visitors engaged even when the entire website content including bulky graphics take ages to render completely. Monitoring high initial page speed by tracking parameters such as Time to First Byte TTFB or performing ping requests from website servers accurately describe initial page load times and page speed statistics.

If these take too long, work needs to be done at the back-end in the form of server-side and website core optimization. Monitoring the time consumed in rendering entire page content onto requesting browsers is an integral element of end-user website experience testing.

This information drives strategic IT decisions in deploying and optimizing hardware infrastructure to maximize website performance. Regularly monitoring this performance indicator enables website owners to realize how the website performs as it scales in terms of size and content type.

With this information, webmasters can cache static content in separate locations such as Content Delivery Network CDN while maintaining dedicated back-end servers to efficiently deliver dynamically-loaded content.

One of the perks of operating an online business is the ever-expanding global market reach. But this reach is not always equally efficient — and hence effective — across the globe due to the very factors that limit client-server communication.

Government policies, bandwidth and technology limitations prevent optimum website performance around the world, so website speed and availability tests should be conducted across disparate locations to determine global website performance results impacting world-wide business reach.

Website performance varies with fluctuations in web traffic. Hosting servers handling the normal load at peak performance may lose page speed under excessive loads.

Conducting stress tests, ramp tests, load tests and other performance tests on websites creates an accurate picture of how much web traffic the website can handle before losing performance or going down altogether. Shared hosting providers running thousands of websites on single Apache servers fail to deliver high performance even when the website is well-designed with a clean and speed-optimized code.

Performance issues intensify during peak load times when insufficient server computing power fails to process website download requests efficiently. Monitoring server CPU load enables hosting companies and IT staff running locally hosted websites to keep a check on back-end hardware capabilities in handling unpredictable web traffic deluge.

Database performance is critical for websites maintaining dynamic content pulled from back-end databases. A mechanism should be in place to detect and alert for inaccuracies in data transmission.

Keeping an eye on free disk space on servers hosting websites locally helps avoid errors and data losses that lead to broken links and eventually degrade website performance. Website owners can leverage an array of free and premium website performance testing services to analyze web pages and generate tailored solutions to fill the deepest of performance loopholes hampering page speed.

Page speed testing tools powered by search engine giant Google , website monitoring specialists Pingdom and GTMetrix yield valuable insights into website performance indicators for free, and programmatically generate scores and suggestions to educate non-geeky website owners.

Check out these in-depth guides to help you get started. These tools use a bunch of browsers to load websites and replicate end-user website experience across disparate geographic locations.

Performance bottlenecks are monitored across various elements of the web page under scrutiny including file size, load time, response time and requests pertaining to various website parts JavaScript, CSS files, HTML, images, etc. The tools generate performance scores based on a set of rules developed in the context of Web page performance and user priorities.

The principles include resource caching, client-server round-trip times, data download and upload size, and a host of rules impacting end-user website experience in terms of page speed. Suggestions are generated in anticipation of page speed improvements that should occur by implementing appropriate performance optimization rules.

For example, if a large image file is served uncompressed, monitoring tools would recommend implementation of various measures to compress the bulky file. Such issues otherwise go unnoticed due to human errors or plain ignorance, neither of which can be completely eliminated. At the same time, page speed monitoring tools would at least empower website owners to identify the issues and take appropriate steps in eradicating hidden website performance bottlenecks.

The following test was conducted using the free Pingdom website speed test tool. Visit Pingdom and conduct the test selecting various geographic locations according to the options provided, and compare the end-results.

Enter your website and hit the Test Now button. It will then return a summary of your site, including a performance grade, a total load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you have on your website.

The performance insights section of the Pingdom speed test tool is very helpful. These are all based on the Google PageSpeed Insight rules. Generally, if you improve these on your site, you should see a decrease in your overall load times.

The tool lists all downloaded files in a waterfall chart form, sorting it in terms of load order, load time, size, type or URL. Analyze the performance of each file download by reading results against the key chart provided within the tool:.

The tool helps to identify the next-best actions for website speed optimization tactics. Performance ratings and test results are therefore bound to be different, and no single tool identifies every single performance bottleneck in website designs.

It is however recommended that you stick with one tool as you make improvements to better monitor your progress. However, testing across multiple tools, analyzing different website design elements and comparing multiple test results provides reasonable insights for online business owners to devise speed optimization strategies for their websites.

D eveloping a great website takes great work. Leading online businesses leverage industry-proven experience, supernatural web development skills and a killer web hosting service to develop websites boasting top-notch performance figures and user experience. But for those who miss this starting point in their pursuit of speed-optimized websites, employing a minimalistic approach in executing simple DIY page speed optimization tactics works almost well enough to patch slow websites.

The knowledge of investing in the right set of website speed optimization solutions and services, website management and perhaps downright coding trickery is essential to yield maximum website performance.

Strategic business decisions based on this knowledge contribute directly toward enhancing website performance that in turn, lead to better online sales, leads, conversions and ultimately business success.

Optimization is the buzzword of success in the cyber world. Cyberspace, like the real physical world of planets, stars and galaxies is itself in flux — a state of continuous change and evolution.

In fact, change is the only consistent process across both the real and the cyber world. Survival in these spaces depends on how well the inhabitants can adapt to varying resources and environmental circumstances.

Online business owners and webmasters adapt their websites to maintain optimal results under the consistent impression of change by improvising and optimizing key elements of website design that make or break page speed.

As a general rule of thumb, larger files take longer to download than smaller files. Web page download time, also known as the Page Load Time depends on the total size of content assets being downloaded from hosting servers to the requesting browser.

High-quality bulky images are the largest contributors to web page size, degrading page speed and agitating visitors eagerly waiting for the web page to load. The following image optimization best-practices go a long way in reducing the negative impact of images on website speed:.

Leverage image optimization plugins such as Imagify , Optimus WordPress Image Optimizer , WP Smush , TinyPNG. And for more tips check out our in-depth image optimization guide. Not so long ago, 30 KB was considered as the ideal web page size.

And that included images, content, graphics, and code making the entire page. The popularity of CSS and JavaScript ripped apart the ceiling of 30 KB page size in delivering enriched website user experience. Yet, modern websites coded in CSS are better at downloading content from hosting servers to requesting browsers efficiently and accurately.

The following best practices ensure a speed-optimized CSS delivery:. Tools such as Autoptimize , WP Rocket , Cache Enabler , CloudFlare CDN , and W3 Total Cache are some of the most popular tools available for minifying JavaScript and CSS.

If you are a Kinsta customer you can take advantage of the code minification feature that is built directly into the MyKinsta dashboard. This allows customers to quickly and easily enable automatic CSS and JavaScript minification with a simple click.

Reducing the number of client-server requests in delivering website content to Web browsers is an integral part of website speed optimization. Webmasters can achieve this by not making too many folks with CSS, HTML and JavaScript requests.

That is to say, optimize, minify and squish all unnecessary and compressible code lines. Minification is particularly important for inline JavaScript and external files not cached. Google recommends minifying all JavaScript files over bytes of size, and a shaving off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference toward page load time.

A rigorous approach toward designing speed optimized website would incorporate a strong intent on eliminating unnecessary bytes from the code. Utilizing all the coding space available, deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining readability of the code reduces the overall size of website core and front-end files.

And for websites already developed without this strategy in perspective, combining multiple server requests for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into single ones effectively slashes sizeable chunks from page load times. Monitoring page load performance changes in response to implementing each minification process individually ensure that only the unnecessary code and spaces are deleted.

Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML share common benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster browser downloading and execution, ultimately boosting page speed and yielding higher scores on website speed measuring tools. Additional website functionality with plugins comes at a price: performance degradation.

Unfortunately, webmasters deploy a myriad of plugins to add attractive but often unnecessary features such as gravatar, profile tools, website stats and font tools — some even use 10 different plugins for social media integration.

The only benefit here is successfully avoiding manual coding. Many popular websites carry as much as 80 plugins. Yet, the number is not entirely a concern if the installed plugins are developed well to avoid complex actions and expensive server processing. If the answer to all these questions is YES , your reaction to the plugin in question should be a huge NO!

A lot of WordPress experts recommend not using too many plugins. But many well-performing websites host over 80 plugins, until they install one low-quality plugin that adds half a second to page load time. Similarly, using 10 plugins for simple and unique tasks is much better than deploying one plugin to perform all of the complex tasks by itself.

Exceptions include high-quality SEO plugins by credible developers, such asYoast SEO , All In One SEO Pack free WordPress SEO plugins and the likes. Revision management is one of the perks that WordPress has to offer.

The CMS automatically keeps track of the content created on the CMS and makes all of it available for future changes. To the server, this costs unnecessary processing through additional database entries not actually required in the first place.

Controlling the number of revisions stored relieves the website core of useless burden. Check out our in-depth guide on how to optimize WordPress revisions for faster performance. This database gets crowded over time, not only with unnecessary content and post revisions, but also with garbage data.

Database optimization revolves around getting rid of garbage data and useless content from cluttered databases, shrinking them in size and making it easier for website hosting servers to fetch requested content efficiently, within minimum processing cycles. This can also involve ensuring that you are using InnoDB for your MySQL database tables, as opposed to MyISAM.

Learn how to convert myISAM to InnoDB. Especially on older and large sites, this can be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes. Change as appropriate.

Compression According to Google , every day the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed Web content. And although most of the latest Web browsers support content compression capabilities, not every website delivers compressed contents.

Visitors to these bandwidth-hogging websites experience insanely slow interactions with Web pages. Primary reasons for this unfavorable and mostly unintentional website behavior include misconfigured hosting servers, Web proxies, old or buggy browsers and antivirus software.

Uncompressed content hurts bandwidth-constrained users receiving the Web content in agonizingly lengthy page load times. Server: On it! Browser: Ouch! Okay, client-server communication is perhaps a bit more formal and less dramatic than the above narrative. Most of the problem lies in the way client-server communication goes in the HTML world.

HTML files making almost the entire Web content includes several redundant code instances. Google recommends the following compression tactics to deliver website content efficiently:.

Not following the above recommendations actually increases file size and page load times due to the overhead of compression and decompression. Developers crave simplicity in website design code. Website code easier to create, read and maintain leads to efficient website development processes.

This includes using the available code functions frequently to cut short extensive coding for specific website functionality. However, adding too many extraneous loops and unnecessary code lines increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds. Influx a torrent of website traffic, and the milliseconds compound to plunge page speed well below acceptable standards.

Webmasters can reduce these response times by delivering cached copies of the requested content instead of rendering it repeatedly in response to every single user request that pings their server. Web cache is the mechanism of temporarily storing copies of web content to satisfy subsequent user requests from the cache database when specific conditions are met.

This process reduces the number of client-server round trips taken in delivering static website content to requesting browsers. Website owners can enable caching with the following add-ons and configurations when hosting service providers do not provide server-side caching:.

Along with static cacheable content, websites also host dynamic information containing unique attributes changing regularly for every end-user. This is the art of caching smaller elements of non-cacheable dynamic website content. These time-and-resource consuming processes are circumvented by delivering the desired output stored as a cached copy.

Fragment caching stores the output of some code blocks that remain unchanged across varied versions of the dynamic content. When the code runs and reaches the code block cached for a predetermined time, the server queries and delivers the cached output of this code instead of executing it repeatedly until the time limit reaches.

The end result is a cache-optimized website content for maximum page speed even for ecommerce and membership-based websites handling intensely dynamic content.

Kinsta actually provides four different types of caching , all of which are all automatically done at the software or server-level. So there is no need to mess with third-party plugins. CDN is an extension of cache optimization designed to supercharge website performance aimed specifically at globally dispersed web traffic.

CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copies of web pages. Internet visitors requesting this information are directed to the nearest server within this network based on their geographic location. Traditional benefits of CDN including performance boost, high availability, and page rank collectively lift business bottom line.

Check out all the reasons why you should be using a CDN. WordPress essentially democratized the web by empowering citizens of the cyberworld to create their own blogs and launch products and services online with minimal investments. In general, website owners leverage one of the following hosting services to keep their websites up and running:.

Among these, employing managed WordPress hosting for end-to-end website development and management services is the most cost-effective and productive option for maintaining an ultra-high performance website. Features of managed hosting services impacting page speed and website performance include:.

With the release of PHP 7 came huge performance gains! So big in fact, that it should be a priority over a lot of the small optimizations you might play around with on your WordPress site.

The following benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with PHP 7 over its previous iterations. PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with the PHP 5. We also ran our own PHP benchmarks. And similarly to the benchmarks above, we saw that PHP 7.

PHP 7. The performance gap between PHP 5. PHP 8. Congratulations and thanks for reading it. We hope you found at least a couple of great bits of advice that you can act upon now! At Kinsta, we provide the fastest WordPress hosting services and with our infrastructure you can rest assured that all the server-side optimizations are taken care of.

Last, but not least, if you found our guide helpful please share it with your friends and followers!

This is a great post Mark, Page speed is an important point if you want your website rank higher. Well written Mark.

All these performance tips are right on the way of a faster web app. Another room for improvement is to avoid CSS expressions. Thanks for sharing informative informative article. Lot of of stuff is here with lot of information about every subject. Long but great article Mark : You can also seed up your website by inlining the above the fold css.

Its easy to generate it using tools like the one from sitelocity. com Do you know a better one? Nice post, but i am very lazy to do it myself : I give this job speedupgency company and now my site loading speed is 2.

your website is amazing and your articles that you post is very informative. I always see your website and always get new interesting information. Thanks for it. The speed of compression must be faster than the time taken in delivering the content uncompressed.

Hey Leonardo, Those GZIP ranges are what Google used to recommend. We appreciate you checking. Thank you for the article. Do I need to specify the lowest network speed we are global site to make sure the website performs well in majority of cases?

Where can I get some examples of network speed in various geographies? Hey MJ! I have a potentially stupid question because I think I know the answer. The client wanting their images will not mind waiting for their page to load as it would be expected, but the rest of the users will need a fast loading site.

Any way around this? The only person that would really be impacted by it is the person loading it. You can see how many times this post has been shared, that tells you how much helpful this article is.

Keep updating the users. Thank you! For any internet site, the loading time is a major factor in developing now. One point I want to tell you that after I moved to Genesis or magazine framework, my blog loading speed has decreased by over 2.

About the images, not so many users are well aware of Photoshop, so for the alternative to optimize graphics there are lots of websites to help you to compress image size that matter greatly on the entire size of your HTML page rendering on the user side.

Also, I switched to a dedicated server and the faster CDN Content Delivery Network that not only work for WordPress for the Blogger as well. The use of CDN and can cause a significant difference in site loading time. I used to make changes to HTML and keep an eye on site loading.

A dedicated hosting including regular tweaking can make a difference. Great Post! It worked for me and I have shared this one on my social media handles. The author has explained in clear terms how the product pages should be optimized. I followed the steps on my site and in few weeks I was able to draw targeted traffic.

These tips are easy to implement and the best part about this post is the easy explanation that the author has offered to some of the common problems that small online store owners like me face. The website performance is an important factor.

But, from my web development experience. I should make a few observations. For example Magento 2 is a monster although it is is one of best solutions for ecommerce. Also, if you use Magento 2 you need to use extensions. Sometimes Magento developers did bad extensions.

Well, it is a problem. Right now, only super slow sites are really impacted by the Google speed update but this might change at some point. Page speed is very important, if I am checking a website and it is very slow, I would not waste my time and just transfer or look for another website.

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You may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions in the communications received. And speed sells! Highlighting the Key Aspects of Website Speed Optimization: Chapter 1 — Introduction to Website Speed Optimization Chapter 2 — Website Performance Impacts Business Success Chapter 3 — Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop Chapter 4 — Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance Chapter 5 — Website Speed Testing — Identify Performance Bottlenecks!

Chapter 6 — How to Improve Website Speed? Chapter 1: Introduction to Website Speed Optimization What Exactly is Page Speed? Page load time There are three core aspects necessary to understand page speed in the context of user experience and website performance: The view of time taken in delivering the requested material along with the accompanying HTML content to the browser.

It will record all the events on your website, including the Core Web Vitals metrics. Step 2: Once you have recorded a performance profile, you can analyze it by looking at the waterfall chart. The waterfall chart shows you the load times of all the resources on your website, including the LCP.

You can use the "User Timing" section in the DevTools panel to analyze the FID. This section shows the time the browser takes to respond to user input.

You can use the "Layout Shifts" section in the DevTools panel to analyze the CLS. This section shows you any unexpected changes in the layout of your website as it loads. Step 3: Once you have analyzed the performance profile, you can identify any issues affecting your Core Web Vitals metrics.

For example, if your LCP is slow, you can investigate the resource causing the delay and optimize it for faster loading times. Step 4: After identifying the issues, you can make necessary changes to improve your Core Web Vitals metrics.

These changes can include the following. Optimize Server Performance: Ensure your web server responds swiftly to user requests. Choose a reliable hosting provider with low server response times. Minimize Render-Blocking Resources: Reduce the impact of render-blocking resources like CSS and JavaScript.

Use techniques like asynchronous loading and code splitting. Lazy Load Images and Videos: Implement lazy loading to defer the loading of non-critical images and videos until they enter the user's viewport. It is advised to optimize your website for Interaction to Next Paint INP , which replaces FID in March Focusing on Core Web Vitals enhances the user experience by providing faster loading, smoother interactivity, and visual stability.

Speed Index measures how quickly the contents of a webpage become visually complete. It considers both the time to first render and the visual completeness of the page. Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content: Load essential content first, especially above-the-fold elements, to ensure users can access meaningful content quickly.

Optimize Critical CSS: Critical CSS contains styles necessary for initial rendering. Extract and apply critical CSS to minimize render-blocking and enhance speed.

Reduce Third-Party Scripts: Evaluate and limit third-party scripts, as they can significantly impact loading times. Use them sparingly and asynchronously. A faster Speed Index results in quicker perceived loading times, directly improving user engagement and SEO.

Image optimization involves compressing and delivering images to maintain quality while minimizing file sizes. Choose the Right Format: Select appropriate image formats JPEG, PNG, WebP based on the type of image. WebP, for instance, provides high quality at smaller sizes.

Resize Images: Scale images to the dimensions they will be displayed at. Oversized images unnecessarily increase load times.

Use Compression: Utilize image compression tools to reduce file sizes without compromising quality. It reduces bandwidth consumption. Proper image optimization reduces page load times, leading to improved user experience.

Optimized images consume less data, making your site more accessible and usable, especially on mobile devices.

Browser caching involves storing static resources locally in a user's browser so that they don't need to be reloaded whenever they visit your site. Set Appropriate Cache Headers: Configure cache headers to specify how long resources should be cached.

Use long expiration times for static resources. Leverage Browser Caching Plugin: If using a content management system, consider using caching plugins that facilitate effective browser caching setup. Version Your Assets: Append version numbers to your asset URLs when you update them.

It prompts browsers to fetch the latest version. Browser caching significantly reduces server load and speeds up page loading for returning visitors. It enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and positively influences SEO ranking due to improved page speed.

Optimizing CSS and JavaScript files involves removing unnecessary characters from code, such as whitespace and comments, to reduce file sizes. To optimize CSS and JavaScript files, here are some best practices:.

Minify Files: Remove unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from CSS and JavaScript files to reduce file sizes. Concatenate Files: Combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one to reduce the number of requests. Implement Asynchronous Loading : Use async and defer attributes to load non-essential scripts asynchronously.

Smaller file sizes and reduced render-blocking resources lead to quicker page loads, reducing bounce rates and improving rankings. It provides an overall website speed score and identifies which pages perform optimally. Learn how to measure your CWV report using GSC.

While GSC gives you an overall perspective, Quattr delves deeper into website speed optimization. Quattr improves upon GSC by providing speed index metrics missing from GSC.

It provides a comprehensive view of core web vitals and other important speed metrics, helping you understand your website performance holistically. Once you know what pages need improvement, it's time to drill down to the specifics of what's causing the slowdown.

That's where Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse come in. These tools precisely analyze what's causing the lag in website loading times. They provide specific insights, such as code that may slow down your site, unoptimized images, or unnecessary redirects.

These insights allow you to directly address the issues harming your website's speed. Next, you should start fixing the issues based on your findings. Once you have fixed the issues, you should validate these improvements through the Google Search Console. Return to Google Search Console and re-run the tests to ensure the issues are properly addressed.

If not, then follow the steps again to improve your website speed. Website speed optimization is an important part of any website's overall performance. Following the best practices can help you improve your website's speed and user experience. However, with the tools like GSC, you can't get a comprehensive view of your website performance.

This is where Quattr's capabilities shine. Quattr underscores the most significant opportunities to enhance your website speed by providing a comprehensive and prioritized audit list. It provides you with a unique perspective on your search competitors' website speeds, allowing you to gauge your performance against theirs effectively and make necessary improvements.

Quattr's precise and actionable recommendations guide you from where you are to where you should be—without squandering crucial resources. Regular website speed tests are essential for ensuring optimal performance and user experience. Conduct a website speed test at least once a month or after significant content updates or design changes.

If your site experiences heavy, fluctuating traffic, consider weekly tests to ensure a smooth user experience. Yes, enhancing page speed directly results in faster website loading. They all contribute to faster data delivery, decreased bounce rates, and improved user experience. Both website speed and quality content are important for SEO.

Quality content is important, as it can attract visitors to your website and encourage them to stay. However, if your website is slow, visitors may leave before they even have a chance to read your content. To achieve faster loading times, you must focus on various aspects. Optimizing these areas enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and boosts SEO rankings.

James Gibbons is the Senior Customer Success Manager at Quattr. He has 10 years of experience in SEO and has worked with multiple agencies, brands, and B2B companies.

He has helped clients scale organic and paid search presence to find hidden growth opportunities. James writes about all aspects of SEO: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

Quattr is an innovative and fast-growing venture-backed company based in Palo Alto, California USA. Quattr's AI-first platform evaluates like search engines to find opportunities across content, experience, and discoverability.

A team of growth concierge analyze your data and recommends the top improvements to make for faster organic traffic growth. Growth-driven brands trust Quattr and are seeing sustained traffic growth.

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Table of Contents. What is Website Speed Optimization? Importance of Faster Loading Website ii. How to Measure Website Speed. Website Speed Optimization Tools.

Targeted approach, focusing on optimizing loading speed for specific pages. Area of Focus Focuses on improving server response time, reducing HTTP requests, leveraging browser caching, and using content distribution networks CDNs , etc. Focuses on optimization techniques such as minimizing HTTP requests for different page parts, like scripts, images, and CSS, optimizing images, and enabling compression.

Goals Consistent user experience across the website, reducing bounce rates and enhancing conversions on a broad scale. For this reason, the time needed to process each request increases.

On top of that, the load time increases when users are physically far from the server. With CDN, user requests are redirected to the nearest server. As a result, the content is delivered to a user quicker and a website works faster. This is a rather expensive, but quite effective way to optimize the load time.

Move your website to a better host There are three possible types of hosting: Shared hosting Virtual Private Servers VPS hosting Dedicated server The most popular type of hosting that is used all over the world is sharing hosting.

With shared hosting, you share CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites that also use this server. Virtual Private Servers and dedicated servers are much faster.

VPS uses multiple servers for content distribution. If your website has the average traffic or you have the eCommerce site with traffic spikes in some periods, VPS will be the optimal solution for you. The most expensive hosting option is to use a dedicated server which can be your own physical server.

In this case, you pay a server rent and hire a system administrator to maintain it. Another approach is to rent dedicated cloud resource from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or other public cloud provider. Both approaches can also be combined into a hybrid cloud that we discussed recently.

With dedicated servers, all resources belong only to you and you get the full control of it. Cloud infrastructures can also add unlimited and on-demand scalability under a number of packages. Serverless architecture is yet another option that removes maintenance and server set up procedures altogether.

Consider reading our separate article covering serverless architecture specifics and benefits. Optimize the size of images on your website Everyone loves eye-catching images.

In the case of successful eCommerce sites, images are the vital part. A lot of photos, images, graphics on your product pages improve engagement.

The negative side of the image use is that they are usually large files that slow down a website. The best way to reduce the image size without compromising its quality is to compress images using such tools as ImageOptim , JPEGmini , or Kraken.

The procedure may take a bit of time but it's worth it. Reduce the number of plugins Plugins are common components of each website. They add specific features suggested by third parties. Unfortunately, the more plugins are installed, the more resources are needed to run them.

As a result, the website works slower and also security issues can appear. As time passes, the number of plugins grows, while some of them may not be used anymore. We recommend checking out all the plugins you have installed and deleting unnecessary ones. First, run the performance tests on your page to find out which plugins are slowing down your website.

Not only does the website speed depend on the number of installed plugins but also on their quality. Try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries.

The best solution is to keep only the necessary ones and ensure that they are kept up to date. Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files If your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it leads to a large number of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access particular files.

If you reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files this will undoubtedly speed up your website. Try to group all JavaScript into one and also do so with all CSS files.

This will reduce the overall number of HTTP requests. There are a lot of tools to minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly. For instance, you can use WillPeavy , Script Minifier , or Grunt tools.

Use website caching In case there are a lot of users accessing the page at one time servers work slowly and need more time to deliver the web page to each user.

Caching is the process of storing the current version of your website on the hosting and presenting this version until your website is updated. The approaches to website caching depend on the platform your website is developed on. For WordPress for instance, you can use the following plugins: W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache.

If you use VPS or a dedicated server, you can also set up caching under your general settings. Implement Gzip Compression Gzip Compression is an effective way to reduce the size of files. It minimizes the HTTP requests and reduces the server response time.

Gzip compresses the files before sending them to the browser. On the user side, a browser unzips the files and presents the contents. This method can work with all files on your website. You can enable Gzip on your website by adding some lines of the code or via a utility called gzip.

Database optimization in CMS Database optimization is the an effective way to increase performance. If you use a content management system CMS packed with complex plugins, the database size increases and your website works slower. For instance, the WordPress CMS stores comments, blog posts, and other information that take up a lot of data storage.

Each CMS requires its own optimization measures and also has a number of specific plugins. For Wordpress, for example, you may consider WP-Optimize.

Reduce the use of web fonts Web fonts have become very popular in website design. Unfortunately, the use of web fonts has a negative impact on the speed of page rendering.

Web fonts add extra HTTP requests to external resources. The following measures will help you reduce the size of web font traffic: Use modern formats WOFF2 for modern browsers; Include only those character sets that are used on the site; Choose only the needed styles This message is provided by the hosting to browsers or search engines when the accessed content of a page no longer exists.

In order to detect and correct a error, you can use error detection tools and plugins. As we mentioned, additional plugins can negatively affect your website speed, so we advise running the resource through external tools for error detection.

If these dead links no longer bring any visits and thus never consume your server resource, then you may leave them as they are. If these pages still have some traffic coming, consider setting redirects for external links and fixing the link addresses for the internal ones. Reduce redirects Website redirects create additional HTTP requests which negatively impact performance.

We advise to keep them to a minimum or eliminate them entirely. First, you should identify all redirects on you page by running a site scan.

You can use Screaming Frog to quickly identify redirects. Then you must check if they serve a necessary purpose and leave only the critical ones. Use prefetching techniques Prefetching entails reading and executing instructions before a user initiates them.

The technique is rather common.