Website Speed Optimization: Best Practices

Users make snap judgments. It takes about 50 milliseconds (ms) (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll stay or leave.

High-performance websites drive high traffic, improve customer engagement, and provide a premium user experience that increases conversions and reduces bounce rates. A slow site can not only damage your reputation but also lead to financial losses. By optimizing website speed, you will attract more leads and increase your sales. Amazon reported increased revenue of 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed. Therefore, this indicator should not be underestimated.

Yojji excels at speeding up websites, increasing website traffic, and converting lookers into bookers. Therefore, we want to unveil some tips on how to improve page load time and performance.

Why Website Speed Optimization Is Important

Page load speed is directly related to website success (conversion, visibility, usability).

• Conversion

A website conversion happens when someone completes a pre-determined and desired action on your website. These actions include filling out forms, signing up for newsletters, sharing content via social media, buying a product, downloading a file, registering for an event, etc. The percentage of people who perform desired actions determines the conversion rate.

• Visibility

Site speed affects the position of a site in the Google search results because Google takes user experience into account when ranking sites. In other words, if your website is too slow, it degrades the user experience, and the site is downgraded in ranking.

• Usability

Website usability (loading speed and response to requests) impacts user experience and user loyalty. The better the usability of your website, the larger and more loyal your audience.

Ways to Assess Website Speed

As you can see, speed really matters. How fast should your website load? The answer is no more than three seconds. The two-to-three second mark is the turning point where bounce rates skyrocket – in fact, 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site. Before optimizing your website speed, you need to audit and determine what is slowing down your website. After the results of the analysis, you should set the main performance targets. It is necessary to analyze the speed of the site after making every change.

There are many tools for assessing speed, but we recommend using PageSpeed Insights. This service tests the performance of your site (mobile and desktop versions) and gives recommendations on how to improve it. Yojji website page performance is shown below.

So, judging by the metrics, the performance of the site is excellent, and some indicators exceed the parameters of the sites with the best results. For example, the largest contentful paint (LCP) metric represents the amount of time between the start of the page loading and the appearance of the main content. Usually, the sites with the best performance have an LCP of 2.5 s or less, and Yojji has 0.5 s.

Guidelines to Speed Up Your Website

Once you have found the weaknesses in the speed of your website, you start working on optimizing it. We have compiled a list of effective performance improvement techniques that we have used ourselves.

1. Minimize HTTP Requests

A large number of CSS files and JavaScript files increase the number of HTPP requests. These requests are processed by a user’s browser, and it takes much time to display all the elements. Also, browsers usually have a limit on the number of concurrent network requests, so if the request queue is too long, some of them will be blocked. Reducing the number of these elements will decrease the website load time. Here are some tips on how you can do this:

• Group CSS files into one. Leverage different tools like Script Minifier or WillPeavy. We recommend that you read the guide for more detailed instructions.

• Use more simplified designs.

• Reduce the number of scripts and paste at the bottom of the page.

2. Choose a better hosting service

Choosing the most reliable host is paramount to your website, as it must respond to all requests as fast as possible. Pick a hosting service according to your needs and requirements.

The most popular type of hosting is shared hosting. It means that you rent disk space on a configured server. The main advantages are low site maintenance costs, convenient hosting setup, and many services offered by hosting providers. However, on shared hosting, you share RAM and disk space with other sites, so the speed of this hosting is not very high.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) offers the affordability of shared hosting but with the performance, reliability, and flexibility of a dedicated server. This type of hosting will be an excellent option for sites with average traffic.

A dedicated server means that you rent a separate physical server. Thus, you have full access to hardware and software, you can independently install the necessary operating systems, change the configuration, and perform any technical work. This option is the most expensive yet most effective. Also, you can use a serverless architecture that offers unmatched scalability at a fraction of the cost.

3. Optimize images

Eye-catching, high-resolution images are extremely important for your website, especially if you run an e-commerce business. In fact, some studies show that online content with images gets 94 percent more views than pages without. So, images do matter as they drive more engagement and revenue. However, rendering high-quality graphics takes time. What is the possible solution?

You can reduce the file size without compromising its resolution. Compress images using handy tools, e.g. ImageOptim or JPEGmini. Another option is to use responsive image techniques. HTML attributes srcset, sizes, and media allow different scaled images to be delivered based on the size and resolution of the accessing device. Read more about properly size images in the guide provided by Google.

4. Reduce the number of plugins

Plugins are one of the typical website components, but every plugin loads additional JavaScript and CSS files; some plugins increase the TTFB time. So the more plugins you use, the slower and more vulnerable your site is. Conduct an audit, identify add-ins that slow down your site, and remove them. Get rid of plugins that generate many database requests, disable plugins when you’re not using them, keep only essential add-ins, and update them regularly.

5. Use website caching

Browser caching offers undeniable advantages, such as reducing bandwidth cost, latency, and server load. However, some speed issues may occur. To solve this problem, you can leverage a caching plugin that will generate static HTML files.

Summing Up

So, website speed is one of the key factors when it comes to website performance, conversion, and users’ satisfaction, especially if your website is the main way to reach your customers. We know that website optimization can be overwhelming, so provided website speed optimization techniques will certainly improve your website performance and set it apart from competitors. However, remember that you won’t implement all changes at once. Evaluate your web pages, analyze what pages cause bottlenecks, optimize them, and then compare the performance before and after your changes.