When doing business online, you should think of your website as a storefront. To entice people into your business, it should be well-kept and contain products, services, or information that your audience values. In SEO, page speed optimization is an important but subtle practice that, if ignored, can turn customers away at the door.
Use File Compression
Online businesses take many different forms, though most can benefit from file and asset compression. If your business relies on using a lot of images, videos, and HTML files, then compressing them will help them load faster. As a result, the pages featuring them will load faster too. Most businesses can benefit from compressing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, to get them beneath 150 bytes.
Other industries make use of visual assets, best seen with video-sharing sites and iGaming hubs. Those sites use hundreds of images, sometimes hundreds on just one page, to advertise their content effectively. iGaming sites are also filled with real cash slot games that can feature detailed backgrounds, animated sprites, animated light features, and a lot of other digital effects. While these effects aren’t resource-intensive on the consumer’s end, hosting all of that data can slow the business website. Fortunately, all larger sites can and do use compression when sending data from the host servers to customers.
Simple compression tools like Gzip or Brotli are free and can bring most coded files beneath 150 bytes. For images and videos, compressing them is more hands-on. Instead of running them through compression software, it’s much better to fine-tune them using specialist software like Adobe’s Photoshop. Fortunately, many guides from SEO experts help online entrepreneurs clean up their site’s visual assets.
Rethink Server Management
Most web hosting options today come with support from a content distribution network (CDN). If CDN support is restricted to a higher payment tier, or your hosting doesn’t offer it at all, then you should rethink your website host. CDNs cache your site’s data across the world, at strategically placed server houses in every continent. So, when users from abroad access your site, they pull from those servers. This takes traffic stress from your main host server and improves loading times, which can be checked with free page speed tools online.
Having too much traffic will slow down your site and all its pages. Switch to the HTTP/2 standard if you’re not on it already and purge plug-ins you don’t use, and other bloatware that will make your server sluggish. Dive into your JavaScript files to load your code faster, a process explained by Google below. Google says that a response time under 200 milliseconds is good, so aim for that figure.
Trim Your URLs & Reduce Redirects
As a website grows, it’s common for its URL situation to get out of control. They get filled with keywords and technical jargon until they take up the entire search bar. When URLs get complex and overlong, user experience suffers and your ranking may be affected. Complex links make it more likely that redirects will occur too, which also slows down page speed.
Redirects force users through HTML’s typical request-response process, which takes up valuable milliseconds of load time. When the search bar adds “https” to your site name query, or “m.” because you’re accessing from mobile, those are redirects. Multiple URLs can become part of this cycle, with a negative impact on load speed after at least three redirects. If possible, find these chains and cut out middlemen so any links on your site find their destination in one hop.
