Ever felt the frustration of clicking on a website, only to find it takes ages to show up? We've all been there. So, how do we speed things up and make it quick and snappy? Well, that's what we're going to explore.
Imagine you have a friend who uses their phone, another who loves their laptop, and someone else, who's all about a different browser. People are different, right? That's why we're going to dig into what makes websites faster for everyone. We will explore the secrets of website speed optimization. Let's get started!
The True Meaning of Page Speed
The term page speed describes how quickly the content loads on your page. It seems obvious that your page will load faster when your content does. Page speed is a broad term and there isn’t a single metric that can accurately describe how quickly your web page loads. It's significantly better to consider page speed as a component of the user experience that users will encounter when using your website.
In an ideal scenario, clicking a search result link would instantly lead to the corresponding page. However, the reality is quite different. Over time, web pages have grown in size, and the widespread use of JavaScript has made them more intricate and challenging to load. Even with high-speed internet and powerful devices, the process of loading a web page can still be frustrating.
Consider your typical web browsing experience. Do you patiently wait for a page to fully load before engaging with it? Or do you start exploring and checking content as soon as it begins to appear? If you choose the latter, have you ever encountered missing elements like text, images, or buttons when scrolling down the page?
Well, the concept of "page speed" goes beyond the speed of loading a web page. It's more about how swiftly it delivers a satisfying user experience. Even if the main content loads rapidly, a page may still feel slow if other elements take their time to appear, requiring users to wait before they can effectively interact with it.
How to Check Website Loading Speed?
Analyze the following three elements of a website:
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Visual stability
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Interactivity
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Loading performance
Based on those three factors, Google established the subsequent metrics:
Loading – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric determines the period of time it takes for the most important content to pop up on the screen.
Interactivity – First Input Delay (FID): This indicator shows how quickly the page reacts to the user's initial input.
Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The reliability of the visual components on your page is evaluated by this metric.
Google has set up rules for how fast your website should load, dividing them into three groups:
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Good
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Needs improvement
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Poor
For example, if your First Input Delay is under 300ms, it's not good, but if it's over 100ms, it's considered better.
To meet Google's standards, 75% of your actual visitors should experience the good loading times or better over 28 days. That means three out of four people visiting your site should have a smooth experience.
Knowing and improving these loading speed metrics is crucial. Plus, if you boost your page speed, it can also help your website rank better on Google.
How Does Page Speed Differ From Site Speed?
When talking about the functionality of websites, some people refer to page speed, while others use site speed. Although they are not the same, they are similar. While site speed describes the overall efficiency of a website, page speed only describes the operation of a single web page.
Measuring how well one webpage works is easier, but figuring out how an entire website performs is tough. This is because website can have lots of pages, and each page is different. So, if most of your pages do well, you can say your site is fast. If not, it's considered having slow site speed.
Factors that Shape Page Speed
A page's loading speed is determined by a number of variables. One thing is the connection quality of your end user. In addition to that, the following variables affect how quickly your page loads:
Hosting Services
Hosting services are essential to the functionality of your website as they provide the server where your website is hosted. Thus, the way your website functions is entirely determined by their server performance. Your host's server configurations, facilities, uptime, and the specifications of the machines that run the servers are some of the factors that affect how well your host performs.
You can make sure that your web server can handle all site activity quickly by selecting a reputable and trustworthy hosting provider.
Website Theme
Themes play a crucial role in shaping your website's appearance, influencing everything from layouts and fonts to color schemes. However, it's important to note that not all themes are made alike. Some are cleaner and more optimized, with smaller file sizes that make them quicker to load. While these themes may have fewer fancy features, like animations or intricate design patterns, this trade-off can lead to improved loading performance, making them a practical choice.
Large File Size
In this section, we are referring to a variety of file formats, CSS, HTML files, but mainly JavaScript. Optimizing these files for fewer bytes or kilobytes will have an effect on the speed of your page. Additionally, JavaScript is used on modern websites to create their dynamic design. It's what enables the dazzling, eye-catching animations and transitions you see on modern websites.
However, excessive use of JavaScript can make a page clumsy and challenging to load. JavaScript is also heavy. Since mobile devices have lower processing power than desktop computers, processing these JavaScript files takes longer, which could explain the low first input delay score in Core Web Vitals.
Badly Written Code
Numerous problems, such as JavaScript errors and invalid HTML markups, can arise from bad code. Performance can drop significantly due to poorly optimized code. Make your code cleaner, get rid of any mistakes, and cut out any unnecessary lines.
Images and Videos
The cause of a page that loads slowly is heavy images. They account for a sizeable portion of the weight (measured in megabytes or kilobytes) of your page. You may have a low LCP score in Core Web Vitals if your page has a large, inefficient header image. This is due to your large image will undoubtedly take some time to load. LCP measures the amount of time it takes for the largest piece of content to appear on the screen. Increasing the speed of your website is greatly aided by image SEO.
Too Many Plugins and Widgets
The use of plugins and widgets to add functionality to your Wordpress-powered website is obvious. What gives Wordpress such strength as a platform is its plugins. However, it makes no sense to use too many plugins because they cause your website to load more slowly. Each plugin you install adds a small amount of code to your page, increasing its overall weight. A website may also be significantly slowed down by unoptimized plugins.
Absence of a CDN
The term CDN indicates content delivery network. It's a global network of interconnected servers and data centers spread out across different regions. They can aid in improving the speed at which pages load, particularly if your audience is worldwide.
Your website's static content, such as CSS and image files, is saved by a content delivery network on multiple network servers. It takes this action in order to promptly provide these files to residents in the vicinity of one of the network's servers.
Let's say you have a server located in Australia, but you receive a lot of traffic from India. The CDN can send files from a server in India in place of sending them directly from Australia, which will speed up and improve the efficiency of the process.
Redirects
They are a fundamental aspect of every website. However, bear in mind that if redirects are not set up correctly, they may affect loading speed of the website. They usually won't cause you to slow down much. However, they will in the case of redirect chains. Your website will load faster if you link as close to the destination as possible to avoid having too many redirects.