website development in Perth : How to optimize your website speed for your site’s health?

Website speed optimization should always be the top priority, especially when there is so much of online competition. Website speed optimization is the primary factor dictating success for modern-day online businesses. After all, unimpressive website performance kills a business’s bottom line when waiting for slower web pages to load frustrates visitors into seeking alternatives. 

A website that is well-optimized not only enhances the user experience (UX) but can also boost your search engine rankings. Hence, during the website development in Perth, it is essential to check the speed. 

What is website page speed?

Website page speed refers to how fast your content loads when a user visits a web page. To be clear with the website speed, the page speed reflects the loading time of a specific page. 

Several factors can influence page speed: 

• The number of images, videos, and other media files contained on the page 
• What themes and plugins are set up on your site 

• Your site’s coding and server-side scripts 

Why is page speed important?

Research reflects that the time a user usually waits before losing focus is almost from 0.3 to 3 seconds. If your website needs more time than that to display the necessary information, the user will ultimately lose focus and possibly move away and close the browser tab. 

Faster websites will have lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, organic search rankings, and an enhanced user experience. 

Simply put, slow websites will cost you more and hurt your brand. On the other hand, loading the web pages faster will positively impact traffic, user retention, and sales. 

What factors affect site speed?

There are several reasons why your website load time is slower are:  

• Too heavy CSS and JavaScript use 
• Poor server or hosting plan 
• The large size of images 

• Not caching the browser  
• Several widgets and plugins 
• Pictures and other resources from slow servers 
• Volume of traffic 
• Older website browsers 
• Slow network connection, especially on mobile devices 

SEO best practices

Google has stated that site speed is one of the most vital signals used by its algorithm to rank the different pages. However, research has also shown that Google might explicitly evaluate time to the first byte when it considers page speed. Besides, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl only fewer pages using their alloted crawl budget, and this could harmfully affect your indexation. 

Page speed is also essential to user experience. Web pages with a longer load time usually have higher bounce rates and very average time on page. Longer page loading times also affect conversions negatively. Hence, pay attention to it during website development in Perth. 

The best practices to amp up your website speed

Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution

The hosting provider you choose to use plays a significant role in your website’s management and performance. That includes its page speeds. There is a handful of performance-focused website hosting solutions you can employ that provide a powerful speed-optimized platform. 

Reduce the number of HTTP requests

Web browsers use HTTP requests to fetch several parts of the page, for instance, images, stylesheets, and scripts from a web server. Your first step should be to eliminate unnecessary requests. You should remove unnecessary images, JS files, stylesheets, fonts, etc. If you are using a CMS, you should eliminate unnecessary plugins, as they often load additional files on each page. Next, you must compress the CSS and JavaScript files. Optimized websites often load all the necessary CSS and JS in a single request for each. 

Compress and optimize your images

Images enhance the appearance of your web pages and increase content quality. However, large images can also delay the loading times. Therefore, one of the simplest ways to improve page loading speeds is to compress and optimize your images.  

Cache your web pages

Caching is another effective way to speed up your web pages. Caching stored copies of your site’s files, minimizing the essential work for the server to generate and facilitate viewing a web page to a visitor’s browser. 

In conclusion

Improving website performance can be challenging, especially with the vast differences in devices, connectivity, browsers, and operating systems. Still, it will have a significant and positive impact on your business if your business relies on your website as one of the main channels for reaching your customers. 

Also, remember that this process doesn’t have a clearly defined start and endpoint. You can implement some of the suggested changes today. Spend time looking into the monitoring tool results, make changes on the website, and then compare the difference before and after the changes. 

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