Business websites often put page speed on the back burner as they think their website speed is the deciding factor. They often invest time and resources into their website speed while neglecting the all-important page speed. However, the reality is quite the opposite! Website speed might have a place in the room, but page speed optimization is something you should never overlook. Page speed constitutes a crucial ranking factor in Google algorithms and can bring several other advantages to the table. This post will reveal everything you need to know about page speed optimization. Keep walking with us to learn more!
What is Page Speed Optimization?
Page speed refers to the loading time a specific web page on your website takes when requested from a user’s browser. It refers to the time your images and content take to load and show up on the screen. Optimizing this speed is essential to throw critical weaknesses and flaws of your website out of the window.
Google ranking and user experience are inextricably linked, and page speed optimization can reflect both elements. Web pages that take too long will reflect a higher bounce rate, adversely affecting the Google ranking and user experience. Identifying the factors that cause your web page to load slowly is necessary, and wiping them off will certainly pay you off.
Page Experience Update Optimization Guide [2022]
Advantages of Page Speed Optimization:
Optimizing your web page speed can pay you off in numerous ways, and you should know about them. Of all the advantages on the list, here are a few that can help you improve your user experience and Google ranking.
1. Enhanced user experience:
One of the most prominent advantages of page speed optimization is giving your online visitors a perfect page to navigate. Your visitors’ patience will grow thin if your web page takes forever to load. Another bad thing? They will never return to your site if it takes too much time to load!
You certainly don’t want your website visitors to click that “back” button because that is bounced. The shorter they stay on your website, the less likely they will convert. Why not focus on your page speed optimization to enhance UX? Consider opting for the best website maintenance service in Dubai and let the experts help your cause!
2. Lowers bounce rate:
The point does not need an explanation, as it should be crystal clear by now. A well-optimized web page will show a lower bounce rate which is a recipe for success in the online community. No other person than SEO expert Neil Patel has better explained it:
“The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that drive high bounce rates.”
A few people will quit your website/web page out of impatience, which is a positive sign. Customers always have a breaking point after clicking on your website, and it should never get to that extreme of a point.
3. Increased Google crawling:
Optimizing your webpage speed can pay you a higher number of pages crawled and indexed by Google. The increased number of pages indexed and crawled means you stand a higher chance of ranking these specific web pages.
The crawling and indexing of your webpages occur under a set bandwidth by Google. It will happen in correlation to your webpages speed. If your webpages take longer to load, this bandwidth will ultimately decrease.
Interested to learn more about Google crawling and indexing process? Check out this guide by Google.
Common Mistakes to Avoid:
When optimizing your web pages’ speed, you are prone to multiple pitfalls as the process is never easy to undertake. Here is a list of mistakes website owners commonly make during webpage speed optimization.
i) Image optimization:
Optimizing images on your website is not a works-for-all strategy for every website, as various aspects could be involved in the process. Image optimization is a detailed process incorporating in-depth analysis and assessment of the following aspects:
- Quality
- Pixels
- Encoded data
- Format capabilities
Moreover, text-in-images is another big no-no as it can never be zoomed into, researched about, and selected.
ii) Redirects:
Redirects never look good on your website; if done improperly, they can increase the loading time of your HTML doc or webpage. Going over-boarding with your redirects is a grave mistake, and you should avoid it.
You may not know how to deal with redirects or other website maintenance issues. The best you can do is check out this guide about how to use 301 redirects to boost organic traffic.
A Guide to Optimizing Your Web Page for Better Speed
This section is all about how to increase page speed and the factors that can affect it.
The most important factor that affects page speed is the size of the website. The more content, videos, images, and other media a site has, the longer it will take to load on a user’s browser. So, it’s important to keep your website lean and mean.
There are a few ways to make sure your site loads fast: Optimize images and media. Use a browser cache plugin, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Reduce the file size of JavaScript to around 100 KB. Save plugins in non-writable zip files (such as .zipx). Share content on social media platforms that don’t support plugin zip files.
There are many ways to speed up your web page, but you don’t need to complicate things when you can make it easier with these four steps.
- Reduce the number of plugins and scripts on your website. Your browser needs to load the content for all these plugins, scripts, and images before it can show your content which will slow down the loading time.
- Optimize your images. Use an image editing software like Photoshop or GIMP to compress the size of your images, so they don’t take up too much space on your website.
- Minimize HTTP requests by combining JavaScript files into one file, CSS files into one file, and HTML files into one file if possible. This will reduce loading times on the website.
- Minimize HTTP requests by serving static HTML and CSS files. This will reduce loading times on the website, but it will not load any JavaScript or images until the user visits a page with JavaScript or images on it.
Keep your website green and running!
Taking care of your website maintenance is essential, especially for user experience and interaction. Since the market is saturated, you should never ignore these points as your competitors don’t have flaws. Consider hiring professional website maintenance companies such as SpiralClick to keep your website green and running! Call these web industry experts today!
