How to improve page speed

It’s very important that your site loads quickly. If it’s slow user never wants to visit the site. Will you want to stay on any site which is taking more than 20sec to load? The answer would be undoubtedly “No never”. Search engines like Google also don’t like to show your page/site on top of their search results, if your site is taking too much time to load. So it’s huge necessary to improve your site performance to be on top. We will disscuss about how can you increase your site speed.

What causes site to be slow

There are numerous factors which are responsible for slow loding of web page. That’s might be your images, your hosting plan, scripts, frameworks. All you need to do is work on each factor for increasing the speed. Though It’s not an easy task achieve speed index to 90+, you can minimise your page loading time by working on each factor. Just follow some of the guidelines provided here which are applicable to your site and see what difference you can make to your site performance. No doubt if you work honestly with the instructions, I will assure, you can get your site speed score to 80-95.

What is site speed score and where can I measure my site performance.

For improving the site you must know what my site speed is and where I am lagging to achieve the performance. Google itself provide a speed measurement tool called lighthouse. You can visit the pagespeed insight page of Google and measure your site speed. It won’t take your much time. Of you want to measure the performance just go to Google pagespeed insight.

Just type your page url and click on analyse button. You will see your page speed index. Now you have your page speed index. And below it you will find the opportunity for improvement. You just need to work on them. Will see some of major factors causing site to be slow and what should you do to improve it.

Eliminate Render blocking resources

It’s one of the most important factor to slow down your site. What’s the render blocking resources? The scripts(js/css), fonts or images which are blocking the next resource to load. For example you have 2 js scripts added to the page. What usually happens is site loads first script then loads another. That means there is a waiting for second scrip to load untill first one is completely downloaded.

So what can you do in such case, just make it asynchronous so that both will be loaded same time. You can make the script async by adding an async attribute to the script. See the example below

<script src=”your_site_script_path” async=true ></script>

You can also use defer instead of async to defer loading them

Reduce server response time

It requires some time for browsers to connect or communicate with the server to get the content. Browser first connect with the server then gets all the content from the server. So its important that server takes less time to respond. For this you need hight speed server resources. You can change your hosting plan or if needed hosting provider if you have more server response time.

Remove unused javascript/CSS

There are some javascript or CSS files which are never used for anything. They are just loading on the page and unnecessarily add the time to load them. You can directly remove them from loading.

Properly size images

You can check for the images on your page. If they are not properly sized it will also increase unnecessary load on the page. For example if your image is bigger in size let’s consider 720x1200px an are showing the image on the small size 240×400 . It will not worth to load that much of bigger image. Just provide a small image which fits exactly the 240x400px.

Minify js/CSS

Serve the js and CSS files with minified version. There are number of online tools which can provide you the minified version for your js/css scripts. Search for minify online. That way your 200kb file may become only 50kb.

Enabled text compression

You can enable text compression to compress all of your page resources to be compressed and have less size to download by the browser. You can do it from the server text compression or if you are using wordpress for your site you can use the plugin for the purpose.

Third party origins

See there are some scripts or images or other resources which you might need to load from third party origins. Ie from other than your site. It requires some time for the browser to connect to the site so you must instruct browser to preconnect with those, that way browser asynchronously try to connect to third party site and don’t block the time to get connected with them. You should also keep in mind to minimise the third party scripts, images, fonts etc.

Avoid multiple page redirect.

If your page is set to redirect multiple times ie from one page to another and then another, it takes time for all the request to process and hence more time to connect to the required page, resulting in low page speed. Just remove the redirects from the page and link to the original page.

I have tried here to cover all the major factors, still there are some other. But if you work on the above you would definitely gain the page speed to considerable amount. You may not need to work on all of them just check your speed index and get the critical one and work on them.

Just drop a comment if you have any queries regarding page speed.