Slow websites are frustrating for users, and can cost the website owner not just revenues, but penalties from Google.
Whilst speed is important, it is essential that we get some perspective on this subject. Speed has become a sort of obsession with some SEO practitioners and website owners, however, from a search engine perspective, this only comes into play if all else is equal.
What are the 3 Pillars of SEO?
No matter what people tell you, these 3 pillars are non-negotiable, and all other SEO actions are tinkering at the edge. If these 3 requirements are not met, Google and other search engines, don’t care how fast or snazzy your website is!
The 3 pillars of SEO still remain the foundation of optimisation for any website. The 3 pillars are:
- Relevance – How relevant your content is for a given search term
- Authority – Is your website a trusted site and an authority on the subject
- Content – How fresh is your content, and whether you have depth and breadth on the given subject
How to speed up your website pageload?
Now that we have some perspective on this, we can explore what you can do to improve your website speed.
Besides writing a clean code, there are a number of actions you can take to speed up your websites.
Speeding up your website pageload requires coding skills, with some exceptions, where you can use plug-ins for WordPress or Joomla to achieve some of the functionality. So do not attempt these unless you have some technical knowledge.
Image compression
After poorly written code, the biggest killer of speed is image size. Images from your digital camera or smartphone are far too large for your website. Typically they are between 1MB to 4MB, so you can see how quickly you can kill your pageload speed with just a couple of images.
Use a photo editing software to first resize your images. Typically 2000 pixel image is wide enough. Most websites do not need anything wider. Resizing is the first step in reducing the size of the image file.
Next use an image compression software (or plug-in if you are using WordPress), to compress the image. Typically a good compression software should reduce the image file to between 1/5 to 1/10 of its original size without losing image definition and perceived quality.
CSS
Styling commands are used on every page, so using CSS instead of inline commands speeds up your pages. Additionally you can compress and combine CSS files, which reduces the size of the page payload further.
JavaScript
You can also compress and combine JavaScript files, which further reduces your payload per page. You do need to be careful as some CMS platforms get a little confused when you play around with JavaScript load order, combination, and compression.
Comments
Comments in a code are very useful for coders, but they still have to be loaded, so reduce the number of comments in your code. If you do not need a code, or a process, do not just comment it out, but remove it as there is no point in loading something you do not need.
Browser Caching
Whilst this does not help on the first customer visit, browser caching allows the website to store a copy of visited pages on visitor’s browser, so next time they visit the same page they load a local copy rather than a copy from your server.
Within browser caching commands, you can set expiry time for images, scripts, content, etc., so the browser will check for any changes before loading the cached version.
Server Caching
Caching software converts dynamic pages into static pages, and leaves a copy on the server so that it does not have to compile every page for every visitor. This significantly reduces the time it takes to build and load a page.
CDN Caching
This takes server caching one stage further, but this depends on your hosting company, as you cannot simply add it to your code. CDN leaves static versions of your pages (even when you have a dynamic website) on a network of servers across the Internet.
Servers tend to be nearest to the visitor’s location, which has a number of benefits:
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- Server response time is reduced as the round-trip time for reaching a server is shorter to servers local to the visitors
- Static pages take less time to load, so pageload time is reduced further.
- As with browser caching, expiry time can be allocated to elements of your pages, so that your local content is always the latest.
SSD Servers
Choose a hosting company with SSD (Solid State Disks) servers. These servers are much faster than traditional disks, as there is no moving parts, hence Data Read Time is much quicker than on a spinning disk. Additionally, they are more reliable, so less chance of server failures.
Contention
Server response depends on how many websites you are sharing your server with. If you are using VPS, Dedicated Servers, or Cloud Hosting, then how many other websites are sharing the links and infrastructure. So again choose your hosting company with care, as low price and high performance do not really go hand in hand.
Summary
You can reduce your pageload time significantly by smart coding and using tools on your server to deliver pages faster. Some functions are server dependant, which is why you should not choose your hosting company based on price alone. Hosting servers and functionality can impede your efforts to speed up your website, so choose carefully.