Online business owners work day and night to hone their SEO strategies. But all the efforts can be unsuccessful if the website takes too long to load. In this digital world, people are not short of options. If a website is slow, it will have a poor user experience. Thus, the users will switch to a competitor’s site within minutes. Not just this, it can deteriorate your ranking too. Google is smart enough to make page speed a ranking factor. Thankfully, plenty of proven tactics are present to help your website load faster and increase your Google Pagespeed score.
But before you start, it is essential to know the website’s current speed. It helps in creating a strategy accordingly.
How can we check this speed? Google provides a tool for it called Google Pagespeed Insights.
Let us see how can we use it:
Google Pagespeed Insights
It is a tool that measures the speed of your web page. After checking the site, it gives you a score between 0 to 100. Here 100 is the best, and achieving anything above 90 is ideal.
Furthermore, the color-coding feature makes it easier to comprehend the report within minutes. You will receive one of the below results:
Green: Good to go
Yellow: Needs improvement
Red: Poor
The best feature of the tool is its feedback. It provides suggestions that you can implement to improve your page’s speed.
Most importantly, the tool works for both desktop and mobile versions.
5 Techniques for Improving Your Google PageSpeed Score
Once you know where your website stands, it’s time to discover helpful strategies. Some of them include:
1. Optimizing Images
Images are ideal for engagement, and avoiding them can spoil your online identity. But bigger images take up much space, increasing the website’s loading time.
Optimization can help you resolve this issue. You can optimize every image, be it an original picture or a stock photo.
Small business owners having a limited budget always pick images from affordable stock photo sites. But to reap the SEO benefit, they optimize them perfectly.
You can also do image optimization in the following ways:
Compress Images
Compressing the images decreases their size, increasing a page’s speed. But make sure not to compress too much. It can deteriorate the image quality. There are tools like Ezgif, JPEG.io, Compressor.io, and many others for image compression.
Pick a Suitable File Format
Understand the basic file formats and their uses. If you are using graphical animations, GIFs are the best.
Consider JPEG when image size is your priority, and you are ready to compromise on quality.
However, if you belong to a business where image quality is your primary concern, PNG is the right choice.
Photography businesses usually consider PNGs as pictures are their key product.
Use a CDN Network
A Content Delivery Network provides content at a fast speed irrespective of the user’s geographical location. Thankfully, image CDNs are also present today. They save visuals on a global server. Thus, images weigh less and load quickly.
2. Choose a Reliable Hosting Server
Investing in a credible hosting service is a wise decision. Though free web hosting may save your hard-earned bucks, they come with a drawback of time fluctuation.
Therefore, choose a hosting server nearest to your target audience. The right hosting plan also plays a crucial role in your website’s performance.
Shared hosting is a cost-effective solution, but it can slow down your site due to the presence of other websites.
A Virtual Private Server, on the other hand, gives you optimal control of the elements affecting your site’s performance.
3. Use Minification
Minification is a process of compressing codes by removing unnecessary data. It is most helpful when the Google Pagespeed Insights report suggests minification for boosting the site’s speed.
Here you need to remove various elements like line breaks, function names, comments, etc. It makes the code more straightforward and faster to read, decreasing the loading time.
You can use this tactic for minifying the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. If you are a beginner, you may find the process technical. But many plugins are there to assist you. WP Fastest Cache, Autoptimize, and Fast Velocity Minify are the most well-known names.
4. Avoid Using Landing Page Redirects
When we use landing page redirects, our users go on a web page different from the one they intend to. It results in spoiling the user experience as well as the brand’s image.
Undoubtedly, technological advancement is transforming the way we live. Today, people are using multiple devices to visit our websites.
But, designing a unique layout for every device seems impossible. A responsive design is the only solution to this problem.
A design that can adjust as per the screen resolution will automatically eradicate the need to use redirects.
5. Use Browser Caching
Before understanding the process of browser caching, we need to see what a cache is. It is a storage area where we can keep the data for a short interval.
Browser caching is a process where a browser temporarily stores the web page resources.
Since the web browser stores such resources in the local drive, they load fast in case of subsequent visits.
But enabling this process seems a bit critical. Therefore, never hesitate to seek professional advice.
Alternatively, you can edit the. htaccess file, which is a risky option. Any single error in this code can give you an opposite reaction.
Instead of decreasing, it can increase the loading time.
Conclusion
In short, a fast-loading website is essential for providing a commendable user experience. But increasing the speed of a website is not that difficult.
Use the Google Pagespeed Insight tool to first detect your site’s score. And make sure to consider the suggestions.
Then, work on the tips mentioned above to improve your site speed. You can also take professional assistance for guidance on the technical side.
After all these changes, recheck your website’s score to determine the impact of the above tips. Good luck! Contact SEOHUB.PK to increase your website pagespeed score today.