One of the most important things that can make or break your website is its speed. No matter how attractive and amazing your website looks, no one will look at it if it loads slower.
In fact, 40% of online users would bounce back from a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If you think that’s harsh, wait till you hear how page speed impacts the e-commerce stores.
Approximately 70% of users say that an online retail store’s speed significantly impacts the likelihood of buying from that retailer. In such a case, every second counts. Every second can either earn you or cost you tons of revenue.
That’s why it’s critical to optimize your website for speed and performance. These tips are sure to help you score a perfect score or close to 100 on PageSpeed Insights. Ready? Let’s get started!
List of 6 Pro Tips for Developers to Speed Up Your Website
Speeding up your website can not only help you retain customers but also be a huge ranking factor that can significantly boost your site on search engines, which can result in more traffic and, eventually, more revenue.
But before we discuss the tips, it’s best to evaluate your website and identify areas that require extra attention. The following list is not a checklist but a guide for fixing the issue slowing down your or your client’s website.
The best tool for that is PageSpeed Insights. You can insert your website’s URL, and it will point out any issue that is causing your website to load slower.
As you can see in the screenshot below.
If your website failed the test, don’t worry! Our guide will help you get the best results possible.
1: Optimize For Core Web Vitals
In May 2020, Google rolled out an update that highlighted a never-before-seen factor: “Core Web Vitals.” Google emphasized this and made it clear that a site that neglects these key factors will not do well in the search engines.
There are three key factors that evaluate user experience on your website.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Let’s look at each of them, one at a time.
1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
It is basically the amount of time it takes your website to load the biggest element. This element can be a massive image at the front or any wall of text at the top of your website.
Google limits the LCP time to 2.5 seconds. In other words, your website only has two and a half seconds to load the largest content of your website. That can be challenging if you are using high-resolution images. That’s why it’s critical to optimize images before uploading them to your website (more on that later).
Usually, PageSpeed Insights lists all the major problems that can help you improve LCP at the bottom of your site report.
But if you don’t feel like going through all of that, here’s what you can do:
- Minify CSS — unwanted lines of codes can make your website slower. Regularly check your code to ensure no redundant line is there and the code is as clean as possible.
- Eliminate third-party scripts — Backlinko found that every third-party script can slow down your website by 34 milliseconds. Eliminating just five of them can help you save 170ms.
- Remove unnecessary elements — Comprising visuals for speed of your website can be worthy in the long run. Search engines prefer a fast website instead of an attractive one.
2) Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
It is the time your website takes to respond to a click or a tap from a user. For instance, choosing an option, inserting your email, or filling up a form.
Note: It is possible that your website may not have a clickable element—this is more likely for blogs. In that case, the report will return N/A on the INP section.
If your website is able to respond to a user’s click in less than 200ms, then you don’t have to worry. Otherwise, here’s what you can do:
- Avoid using recurring timers — Using setTimeout and setInterval in Javascript can cause INP issues. Eliminating them will help your website load faster.
- Break up the long tasks — Breaking down long, hectic tasks into small chunks may help eliminate INP problems.
- Eliminate third-party scripts — Similar to LCP, eliminating third-party scripts can also assist in reducing INP.
3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CMS)
Whenever your website’s layout shifts, users may accidentally click on something they did not intend to. This can be a huge problem for eCommerce stores.
For instance, you land on a website, and a massive ad appears at the top. As it loads, it pushes the site down, causing the entire site to shift. This creates a negative user experience and might be the reason behind your store’s lower rankings on the SERPs.
If you are developing an eCommerce store, these tips are going to save you a lot of time and energy:
- Utilize set size attributes — It implies a restriction on the size of visual elements. So that, when they load, the user’s browser knows precisely how long this element is going to be.
- Add dedicated space for ads — As discussed above, an ad appearing at the top can push other elements down. Or use ads below the fold.
Please Note: If this entire optimization seems daunting to you, we recommend getting help from the best web development services. They have specialized teams for website speed optimization.
2: Optimize Images
Usually, websites use massive 3000-pixel-wide images that are absolutely useless. Most computers display images that are 1,920 pixels wide or smaller. Anything above that is redundant. You can reduce an image size without compromising quality by adjusting its dimensions.
You can also use an image compressor such as Photoshop or any web application (such as, TinyPNG) that can compress your JPEGS into much smaller size making it easier for the browser to load.
Moreover, always serve images in next-generation formats. Formats like WebPG or AVIF retain quality even after compression, unlike JPEG. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, you can automate this task using an image optimization plugin, such as Imagify or WP Compress.
3: Utilize Caching
Cache eliminates the need to load the entire website every time a user lands on it. It enhances user experience while reducing bandwidth usage and preventing network congestion.
Whenever a user enters the site, their browser saves a copy of the webpage. And when they revisit it, that copy is shown to them instead of fetching the data from the servers and loading the entire site again.
That helps tremendously for frequent visitors. CSS-heavy, complex websites that require heavy elements to be loaded on every request can significantly reduce load times with cache.
First, determine the elements that can benefit from the cache. These elements must be static and not frequently updated. Then, you can set cache-control headers that communicate caching instructions with the users’ browsers. You can try caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket for WordPress.
4: Eliminating Redundant Render-blocking JavaScript
As we learned, eliminating a single script can save 34ms while loading your website.
So, it’s wise to put your website in PageSpeed Insights and re-evaluate every script that your website has to render in order to load your website completely. Although we do not recommend chasing the numbers, if you think this piece of load can be eliminated without sacrificing the site’s functionality, it’s better to delete it.
However, if you think that one piece of code or a script is helping to provide a clean user experience, then it’s better to keep it. User experience comes first!
5: Minify CSS and JavaScript Files
Minifying the code can also significantly improve your website’s load speed. Minification eliminates redundant characters like whitespaces, comments, and line breaks in your source code.
These extra characters can be helpful for a human but are unnecessary for a machine. Getting rid of them makes the code cleaner and easier for the machine to read. Obviously, the faster the machine reads the code, the faster it can load it.
You can get help from an online tool like minifier.org to minify your code.
6: Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can also help you get the best of your website’s speed. CDN services, like Cloudflare, have servers worldwide. When you upload your website to one of their servers, it sends a cached copy to all their servers worldwide.
Afterward, whenever a person jumps on a website, it sends a request to the nearest server, reducing the distance between the two servers. Hence, it loads faster and helps enhance user experience.
If your hosting provider is not compatible with the CDN network, switch hosts. Alternatively, buy a VPS to gain more control over your hosting.
If none of the above is working…
If you have tried everything that could be done and your website still loads like a snail – as we discussed earlier – you can get help from any reputable web development agency.
Good luck with your speed optimization journey!