A page speed refers to the time a browser takes to process and load the contents of a page. A website’s page speed is a key indicator of its performance. If a site's page speed is high, it shows its good performance and its potential to rank higher in Google search results. This article discusses different ways to optimize a site’s page speed for it to perform well in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Page speed, or any website’s loading speed is the time taken to load a page. A slow loading speed is a buzzkill for any user since it negatively impacts user experience. Improving the loading time of any site is called page speed optimization.
Google’s ranking algorithm considers page speed to be one of the important ranking criteria. Users usually don’t prefer slow sites, hence the bounce rate (the number of people who visit a website, and leave without visiting any other page of the same website) of slow websites will only increase.
Since a slow page speed negatively impacts a website’s rankings, a good loading speed results in higher rankings.
While there are many platforms where one can check their page speed, Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix continue to be the most famous ones.
Simply go to Google PageSpeed Insights, type in the page URL and within seconds it will display the performance score. Google PSI uses field data and lab data to provide recommendations for improvement.
Similarly, GTMretrix takes in the URL and shows the “GTMetrix grade” for the URL. Along with the overall grade, it also generates a detailed report showing essential insights like structure score, web vitals score, and performance score. But there is a limitation to their free plan; they don’t assess the performance of the entire website, only a specific page.
That’s where RabbitLoader comes in,in its free plan it is equipped to show the performance score of multiple pages of a website.
Another helpful tool for checking page speed is Google Lighthouse, a free analysis tool that checks a site’s performance, accessibility, and SEO.
Now that we have a clear idea of what page speed is and why it is important, it is essential to understand how a page speed is measured.
Page speed has a few core metrics, based upon which, a site’s loading speed is determined:
LCP assesses how well a website loads. For ensuring an amazing user experience, LCP should not exceed 2.5 seconds from the time the page first loads.
First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a performance metric that determines when a user experiences a real element like images of the website for the first time. Websites should aim for a First Contentful Paint time of 1.8 seconds or less.
CLS scores that how often a page’s layout changes when a user is browsing it.
Any time a specific page element moves from one displayed frame to another frame, it is termed as layout shift.
These three core web metrics contribute majorly to a page’s loading speed. If these three have a good score individually, the page speed will be decent, giving the users an optimal user experience.
Now we can dive into different ways a website owner can optimise their site’s loading speed.
A page’s loading speed can significantly improve by the following:
A Content Delivery Network(CDN) is an interconnection of distant located servers and proxys . They keep replications of the content on several servers in several places. To maximize content delivery, the CDN selects the server—or servers—that are closest to the visitors' actual location when they visit your website.
Images help make a website attractive and intuitive.Moreover,high-resolution images can also negatively impact the loading time. To save time,it is advised to compress these images before adding them to the website. Many photo-editing programs now have “next-gen” image formats available that optimize images for websites.
Converting the images to next-gen formats like WebP and AVIF is another image optimization technique that helps to increase the page speed.
Minifying refers to discarding unnecessary parts of the code by removing comments and white space. Minifying CSS and JS files helps reduce the file size, which enhances the loading speed.
Caching is an important aspect of website optimization since it helps improve page performance. It refers to storing a website’s resources in the browser to improve its loading speed. Caching has a huge impact on SEO metrics.
Asynchronous loading is often accomplished via callbacks or async/await functions, which allow the application to continue doing other tasks while a specific function or resource is loaded.
A callback function is a function that is supplied as an input to another function and then invoked within the outer function to perform a routine or action.
Compressing the file size without compromising the quality is a proven way to increase a website’s performance.
In conclusion, page speed boosts a website’s performance significantly. So it is important to have a fast page speed so that the site can be ranked higher among the search results. Page Speed considers three core web metrics, namely TTFB, FCP, and Onload Time.
The different ways to optimize page speed include:
