In July 2018, Google officially announced Page Speed to be a ranking factor.
We have already been talking about page speed being a very vital component when it comes to search engine rankings. Therefore, it is important for you to know to measure and improve your page speed.
To measure page speed, Google released its online tool called Page Speed Insights which helps you test your website. Page Speed Insights will assign your website a score on a scale of 100 based on how well your website performs.
Page Speed score is recommended to be above 70. Anything less than 70 is not considered a good performance. So, how do you optimise and improve your Page Speed Score? Let’s talk about that.
How To Improve Page Speed Score
1. Reduce The Size of Images
One of the most common elements that make the website heavy is the image. And images are more commonly used on a website to make it more attractive.
The first step you should take to improve your Page Speed score is to reduce the size of the images. When you run the Page Speed Insights test on your website, it should be able to give you the source of images that are making your website heavy.
Get those images and try to reduce their sizes by compressing them. Reducing the size of the images is a guaranteed way to improve your Page Speed Insights Score.
2. Serve Images In Next Gen Format
When trying to compress your images, you might notice that JPEG or PNGimage formats don’t get compressed much.
In that case, you would wanna try some image formats which allow for greater compression.
Such image formats are Webp or AVIF. Consider changing the format of your images to either one of these two.
3. Content Delivery Network
When your browser requests the website from its host, a lot of resources are requested to load the website such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Images and more.
Transferring those resources to the browser takes time and thus a website’s loading time gets increased. How do you minimize the loading time of the website? That’s where Content Delivery Network or CDN may help.
A CDN is a group of a geographically distributed group of servers optimised for efficient delivery of internet content. By Having your website resources distributed over CDN, a user does not have to get resources from the website original server, rather resources are delivered from a server that is closest to the user’s geographic location.
This in turn reduces the website’s loading time.
4. Avoid Large Video Files
Videos are heavy resources and they easily make the website load slower. At first, you should avoid using any large video file on your website.
However, if you cannot avoid using video, you can host your video on another platform like YouTube and embed it into your website. This ensures that video is not being served from your website’s server.
5. Remove Unused Resources
It is very common to find out that your website might be loading some resources which might not end up being used by the website. Some of the examples are unused JavaScript and CSS. Your developer might help you figure out unused resources and remove them to increase your page speed.
For example, styling frameworks such as bootstrap are commonly used to design websites. But not all of the bootstrap library is used by the designers, only some pieces of the code are used to give styling to elements such as buttons, menus, etc.
And you will usually find that you are not using all of the BootStrap libraries. So, you should consider removing BootStrap which you are not using. Keep only that much which is actually being used to provide styling to the website elements.
6. Minify JavaScript & CSS
When Developers write code, they add some spaces, indentation, etc to improve the readability of the code. A code has to be readable. It is standard practice when writing any code. But such formatting adds to the size of the JavaScript. That’s why we minify the JavaScript to reduce its size and improve our page speed score.
The same thing can be said about CSS. We can minify CSS also to improve the speed of our website.
If you are using some CMS like WordPress then there are plugins that automatically minify your JS and CSS files. Try searching JavaScript minification plugins for WordPress.
These were some of the ways you can improve your Page Speed Score. When you run Page Speed Insights on your website, it will provide you a comprehensive list of things you can do to further improve your score.
Search Engine Code Team is comprised of SEO experts and strategists having more than 20 years of combined experience. We keep testing and delivering knowledge of SEO for the community of SEO.
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