Slow site speed, can result in lower overall site traffic, lower search engine rankings, and negative user experiences.
Website performance, also known as website speed, describes how quickly a browser can load fully functional webpages from a specific site. Users may give up websites that perform poorly or load slowly in their browser. Sites that load quickly, typically receive more traffic and convert at a higher rate.
There could be a number of reasons why your site takes so long to load. Among the possible explanations are:
- CSS and JavaScript are used.
- Inefficient server/hosting strategy
- The dimensions of the large image
- No browser cache is being used. There are too many plugins and widgets.
- Image and other resource hot linking from slow servers
- The traffic flow
- Browsers that are no longer supported
- The network connection is slow (mobile devices)
There are a variety of reasons for slow site speed, but there are steps you can take to improve site speed.
Improve Your Web Hosting Services
Your website's speed is directly affected by the hosting service you choose. Of course, if you use a shared hosting service, the speed of your website will suffer.
You have the following hosting service options:
- Shared: The most common type of hosting service, in which you share your hosting space with other people. It also has a number of disadvantages, such as being one of the causes of your site's slowness.
- VPS (Virtual Private Server): A virtual private network that is much faster than shared hosting services.
- Dedicated: A dedicated server is a computer that you rent specifically for your website. It is, of course, one of the most expensive services available.
As a result, make sure that you choose the best hosting service plan for your website. This is also one of the techniques for increasing a website's speed.
Image Size Optimization for Websites
Your website will definitely slow down if it contains high-resolution images.
Assume you used 2x or 3x image resolution, which looks good on high-density displays... but your users aren't using such high-resolution displays or have slow mobile data connections, which will definitely affect website performance.
Using the correct image size on your website will improve both user experience and speed.
Reduce The number of HTTP requests
HTTP requests are used by web browsers to obtain information from web servers about various components such as images and scripts. Because browsers frequently have a limit on the number of parallel network requests, if you have a large number of requests on the waiting list, some of them may be stopped if the line is too long.
As a result, you should prioritize removing these unnecessary requests. Then, determine your website's minimum render time and load only the external resources that are required.
Remove any unnecessary images, JavaScript, fonts, or other elements. If you use WordPress, remove any unnecessary plugins. They frequently load external files onto the page.
Reduce the number of plugins.
Plugins are added features to CMSs such as WordPress. It is sometimes built into other website platforms.
Plugins are useful because they extend the CMS's functionality. However, plugins can sometimes cause a website to load slowly. Each plugin will load additional CSS and Javascript files. As a result, some plugins may take a long time to load because they require additional processing on the server for each page.
As a result, it is advised that you go through the plugin list again and keep only the plugins that you truly require.
What are the most important metrics for website performance?
Load time is the time it takes for an entire webpage to load in the browser, suggesting that each HTTP request must be completed. Almost every page on the Internet will require multiple HTTP requests because multiple resources, in addition to the page's basic HTML, must be loaded.
The page size is the total file size of all the resources that must be loaded for the page to function. Page size affects how long it takes a browser to load a page, and it can also have an impact on mobile users who may be paying for data as they load web pages.
The amount of time it takes between a browser's request for a webpage and the entrance of the first byte of the response is referred to as Time To First Byte (TTFB). TTFB is still considered when determining website performance and may have an impact on SEO, even though overall load time is more important.
