Do you know a slow-loading website may ruin all your efforts and lead you to get a lower conversion rate? Many website owners are struggling with a slow-loading website. Are you among them?
Understanding PageSpeed and the importance of optimizing it
PageSpeed measures the span of time a website takes to display its content in the user browser. PageSpeed is the first thing that can build the first impression of the users minds when they visit a website. Thus, optimizing PageSpeed performance is essential.
Let’s discuss the benefit of optimizing the PageSpeed performance.
- Enhance the user experience
- Achieving the desired conversion rate
- Boost your website’s ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
Enhance the user experience
A slow-loading website can frustrate the user and lead them to leave the website which increases the bounce rate of a website. On the other side, improving the PageSpeed performance builds a positive impression on the user’s mind and engages them with the website’s content.
Achieving the desired conversion rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of website visitors who are converted into potential leads by completing the desired task like booking a ticket, filling up a form or others.
A faster-loading website always leads to a lower bounce rate which can help you to achieve a noticeable conversion rate.
Boost your website’s ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
Not only the user experience but website optimization also can help you to get a higher ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), which can increase the organic traffic and page views of the website.
How to measure the PageSpeed performance?
It’s essential to measure the PageSpeed performance. Here, we will mention some website PageSpeed analyzing tools that you can use.
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
For your better understanding, Google PSI sets some values to categorize your website’s performance. If a website performance score is more than 90, you can consider this a good PageSpeed performance, whereas a below 90 website score needs to be optimzed.
Google PSI also helps by providing suggestions to improve PageSpeed performance and achieve a 90+ PageSpeed score.
GTMetrix
In GTMetrix, you can see the PageSpeed performance for each web page. Like Google PSI, GTmetrix also provides suggestions for improving PageSpeed performance, which leads to achieving a good score.
Measuring the PageSpeed performance after website optimization is also recommended for a better understanding of the performance improvement.
5 ways for Website Optimization
Here, we will mainly focus on the 5 effective ways to improve the page loading time of a website and enhance the user experience (UX).
- Optimize all images
- Minify the resource files
- Implementing browser cache
- Using CDN cache
- Optimize your CSS files
Optimize all images
Adding high-resolution images can improve the website’s visual appearance along with the brand trust. However, images can negatively impact PageSpeed performance as well.
Minify the resource files
Text-based resource file minification is one of the most effective website optimization methods that significantly reduce file size. Developers often use some characters like comments, spaces, and line breaks which are not necessary for page loading.
Manually minification is time-consuming. The best way is to use an online minification tool like RabbitLoader, HTML minifier, UnCSS, and others to minimize all text-based resource files effortlessly.
Implementing browser cache
Implementing a browser cache is a website optimization technique of locally storing resource files like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and image files. After implementing the browser caching mechanism, the requested content will be retrieved from the browser cache instead of the hosting server, improving the page loading time.
Several cache plugins are available, like WP Rocket, RabbitLoader, WP super cache, and W3 Total Cache, to implement an effective browser caching mechanism.
Using CDN cache
While a high physical distance between the server and the user can increase the network latency as well as page loading time, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can mitigate this issue by distributing the content among the proxy server.
Using a separate Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be costly. However, if you have already installed RabbitLoader for websites optimization, it will also serve the content from it’s in-built CDN.
Optimize your CSS files
Few websites optimization tools reduce the unused CSS, but most tools are unable to generate the critical CSS. the best practice is to use RabbitLoader, which optimizes your CSS file by reducing the unused CSS as well as generating the critical CSS.
Conclusion
Website optimization is essential to enhance the user experience. If you are also struggling with a slow-loading websites, you can implement the above websites optimization strategies to improve the PageSpeed performance.