Pagespeed Optimization: 15 Measures to Improve Pagespeed

1. What is page speed optimization?
2. What goals are pursued with page speed optimization?
3. How can the loading speed of a web page be measured?
4. What areas can pagespeed optimization be performed for?
5. 9-step guide for faster loading times of your website
6. 6 tips for speeding up your website speed 
7. Tool tips for page speed optimization 
8. Conclusion 

A fast website is essential these days, as long loading times can negatively impact the user experience, affect the ranking of your website on Google and even lead to the loss of potential customers.

In this article, our guest author Pascal Saxarra presents a 9-step guide that you can use to improve the page speed of your website and thus optimize the performance of your site. In addition, you will receive important tips & tools that will make page speed optimization easier for you.

What is page speed optimization?

Page speed optimization is part of technical SEO and refers to a series of techniques and measures that are applied to improve the loading time of a website. A fast loading time is not only important for the user experience, but also for search engine ranking, as Google and other search engines prefer fast websites and use loading time as a ranking factor.

Essentially, it is about optimizing the various factors that influence loading time, such as server performance, compression of code and images, caching strategies, and much more.

Why is optimizing the loading times of a website important?

Optimizing the loading time of a website is important for several reasons. First, a fast website positively affects the user experience. A fast website contributes to users staying longer on the website and engaging with the content. This can also positively affect the conversion rate.

On the other hand, if a website loads slowly, this can be frustrating and may lead to users leaving the page before they even had the chance to see the content. If the page load speed increases from just 1s to 3s, the bounce rate increases according to Google directly by 32%.

Figure 1: Source Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.

In addition, the website speed is an important factor for ranking in search engines. Google has repeatedly emphasized that fast websites are preferred and perform better in search results. Therefore, if your website loads slowly, this could result in it being displayed lower in the search results and receiving less traffic.

In summary, a fast loading time has a positive impact on ranking, dwell time, bounce rate & user experience and allows for a higher conversion rate.

What goals are pursued with page speed optimization?

Optimizing the loading times of a website is very important for several reasons. Here are the main reasons at a glance:

1. Improved user experience: A fast-loading website is a crucial factor for a positive user experience. Users expect a fast and smooth interaction with a website. Improved page speed allows visitors to access content faster and experience a lower bounce rate. This leads to a higher engagement, longer dwell time, and overall higher user satisfaction.

2. SEO Ranking factor: As mentioned earlier, Google prefers fast websites and considers loading time when positioning in search results. So page speed optimization can help your website rank better and get more traffic.

3. Higher Conversion Rate: A fast website can also positively affect the conversion rate. A study by Akamai showed that a delay of just one second can reduce conversion rate by up to 7%. A faster website can therefore contribute to more visitors becoming customers.

4. Mobile Usage: More and more people are using the internet via mobile devices. The search engines also know this, which is why Google now completely relies on the approach of Mobile-First Indexing. 

5. Crawling: Crawlers have a limited crawling budget that is available for searching and indexing websites. An optimized page speed shortens the loading times of your website, allowing the crawlers to capture more pages in less time. This makes important pages and content more efficiently captured and included in the search engine index.

Overall, optimizing the loading times of a website is crucial for the user experience, search engine ranking, conversion rate, mobile use and crawling. However, these goals are not independent of each other, but are interconnected. Page speed optimization can therefore help achieve multiple goals at once.

When should you optimize your page speed?

Ideally, the speed of your website should be an important factor from the start. After all, a responsive website is not only a mark of quality, but it can also contribute to visitors staying longer on your website and visiting more pages. However, there are several factors that indicate that it is time to optimize the loading times of your website.

An obvious indicator is the perceived speed. Do you find the speed slow yourself or do you receive feedback from users that your website is loading slowly?

Other factors can be high bounce rates and low conversion rates. If visitors leave the website quickly without interacting with the content or performing the desired actions (e.g., completing a purchase, registering) on the website, this may be due to long loading times. Users often have little patience and tend to leave slow websites.

Also, if you regularly publish new content on your website, you should regularly check your loading times. A larger number of files, images, and scripts can significantly affect the loading time of your website.

How can the loading speed of a web page be measured?

The loading speed of a website is a crucial factor for the user experience and ranking in search engines. An important method for measuring loading speed is using the so-called Core Web Vitals. Google introduced these as official ranking factors in a major Page Experience update in summer 2021.

The Core Web Vitals are a group of metrics developed by Google to evaluate the user experience in terms of speed, interactivity, and visual stability of a website. They provide important insights into the performance of a website from the user's perspective. The three core metrics of the Core Web Vitals to measure loading speed are:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This value measures the time it takes to load the largest visible content of a website.

2. First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures the delay between a user's first interaction attempt (e.g. clicking a button) and the actual response of the website. A low FID value enables smooth interaction with the website.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric evaluates the visual stability of a website. It measures the number of unexpected shifts of elements during loading. A small shift of content prevents users from accidentally clicking on the wrong elements.

To measure the Core Web Vitals of your website, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you detailed information about the loading times of your website and indicates possible areas for improvement.

In addition to Google PageSpeed Insights, there are other free tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom or WebPageTest that offer you a detailed analysis of your website. Some of these tools also allow you to measure the loading speed of your website from different locations worldwide, so that you can optimize the performance of your website for visitors from different regions.

In addition to these tools, you can also use the developer tools in your browser to measure the loading time of your website. Developer tools are integrated into most modern browsers and provide a comprehensive set of diagnostic tools, including the ability to display network utilization and loading times.

What areas can pagespeed optimization be performed for?

There are different areas in which you can perform page speed optimization to improve the loading speed of your website. These include:

• Server Optimization: An optimized configuration of server settings can improve the loading time of your website. This includes aspects like choosing the right hosting provider, configuring server caching, or using Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

• Code Compression: Optimizing the code of your website can reduce file size and thus improve loading time. This includes, for example, compressing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files or removing unnecessary comments and spaces in the code.

• Image Optimization: Images often make up the largest part of a website's file size and can therefore significantly influence the loading time. Image optimization can reduce file size and improve loading time. This includes aspects such as choosing the right file format, reducing image size, or using image compression tools.

• Onpage Optimization: Optimizing the onpage factors of a website can also contribute to improving the loading time. This includes, for example, using browser caching, minimizing HTTP requests, optimizing the site structure, or using lazy loading for images and videos.

9-step guide for faster loading times of your website

In this section, you will receive a step-by-step guide to optimizing the loading time of your website. 9 specific measures are listed that you can carry out to improve the speed of your website

1. Analyze the current loading time of your website: Before you start optimizing, you should find out how fast your website currently loads. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to measure the performance of your website and identify bottlenecks.
2. Optimize your images: Images can play a big role in the loading time of a website, so optimize for SEO all images on your website. 
   • Use the right image format: Use the WebP format for high quality images, which are noticeably smaller than PNG or JPEG files.
   • Scale images to the right size: Make sure that images are only as large as they need to be.
   • Compress Images: Use tools like tinypng or kraken.io, to compress your images without visible loss of quality.
3. Minimize & compress your code: Keep your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code lean by removing unnecessary code, spaces, and comments. 
4. Use Gzip compression: Using Gzip reduces the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files before they need to be sent to the browser and downloaded by the website. This reduces loading times and reduces bandwidth.
   Gzip compression is enabled by default on most webservers. To ensure that compression is working, online tools like Gzip Checker can be used.
5. Reduce the number of HTTP requests: Each component on your website, like images, scripts, or stylesheets, requires a separate HTTP request to load from the server. The more requests, the slower the website loads. By combining files and using CSS sprites and data URLs, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests.
6. Use caching methods (browser and server caching): Implementing browser and server caching can greatly improve the loading time of a website by speeding up repeated requests and reducing server load. This caches locally retrieved resources of a website such as images, CSS files, or scripts. Caching avoids having to load all content of the website every time anew.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that deliver content to users who access it. Using a CDN can shorten the loading time of a website because users receive the content from a server near them, rather than from a server that may be far away.
8. Optimize your website for mobile devices: Make sure your website loads quickly on mobile devices. A fast website is especially important for mobile usage since mobile connections are often slower than desktop connections.
9. Measure success: Regularly test the loading speed of your website and check whether the optimization measures deliver the desired results. Adjust your strategy as needed and continuously optimize your website further.

Optimizing the loading time of your website can improve user-friendliness and increase the conversion rate. There are many different techniques for improving the loading time, and you should try out different approaches to find out which ones work best for your website.

6 tips for speeding up your website speed 

In addition to the measures mentioned above, there are other tips that can help improve the speed of your website:

1. Improve server performance: Use a reliable hosting provider and a server location that is closest to your target audience.

2. Use Lazy-Loading: Lazy-Loading is a technique where images and other content only load when they are visible on the screen. This prevents visitors from having to wait a long time for all content on a page to load.

3. Avoid unnecessary plugins & scripts: Plugins & scripts can slow down your website's loading time, even if they are not actively used. Therefore, avoid all unnecessary plugins & scripts to improve the speed of your website.

4. Use of fonts: Web fonts can slow down the loading time of the website, especially if many different fonts are used. Therefore, the number of web fonts used should be reduced and instead, standard fonts should be used.

5. Minimize redirects: Redirects direct users from one page to another, which can cause additional delay. Therefore, unnecessary redirects should be avoided and direct links should be used instead.

6. Optimize your database: A slow database can slow down your website's loading time. Optimize your database by regularly deleting outdated and unnecessary data and adding indices and keys to increase search speed.

Tool tips for page speed optimization 

There are several tools you can use to measure and optimize the speed of your website. Here are some of the best tools:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: Google PageSpeed Insights is a free service from Google that rates the speed of your website on mobile and desktop devices and gives you recommendations for improving speed.

• Pingdom Website Speed Test: Pingdom Website Speed Test is a free service that measures the loading time of your website and gives you detailed information about the loading time of each element on your website.

• GTmetrix: GTmetrix is a free service that provides you with a comprehensive report on the loading time of your website, including detailed recommendations for optimizing loading time.

• WebPageTest: WebPageTest is another free tool that measures the loading time of your website and provides you with detailed information about the loading time of each element on your website.

Conclusion 

Page speed is undoubtedly a crucial factor for the success of a website. A fast website not only provides a better user experience but also a better ranking on search engines like Google. There are various measures that can be taken to improve the loading speed of a website. From optimizing images and code, to using caching methods, to improving server performance, there are many factors that can be adjusted. The choice of the right Content Management System can also have a big impact on loading time. But with the right tools and a systematic approach, anyone can improve the page speed of their website and thereby bind visitors and win new users.