The speed at which your individual web pages load in a browser is extremely important and a slow loading web page can affect your search engine ranking results. This is an important element of the Search Engine Optimisation Process that is very often forgotten
As broadband internet connection speeds have improved, your website visitors have become more demanding and have a high expectation of fast web page loading times. Your visitors are no longer prepared to wait for a slow web page to load up. It is therefore important to monitor your website loading speeds and fix any issues that are preventing it from loading, as fast as possible.
Apart from annoying your web visitors who may simply decide to view one of your competitors sites, slow web page loading speeds can also have an impact on your rankings, particularly on Google. You should therefore be prepared to invest some time in optimising your website’s page load speed to ensure that you are not being penalised.
Some time ago, Google announced a new ranking factor for 2021 called Page Experience. It now seems likely that Google will start using the new ranking fact from May 2021 onwards.
So, what is “Page Experience” all about?
Essentially it is about measuring how quickly the key elements of your website, which Google call your Core Web Vitals, load inside a users web browser. Slow loading websites, that do not meet a minimum speed loading threshold are likely to be penalised in the Google search results.
The following top tips will help you to achieve a faster loading speed for your Core Web Vitals:
Optimise your images
It is recommended that you only upload images with a Jpg extension. Images that have been saved in this file format offer a good compromise for multicolour graphics, illustrations and photos, as it offers excellent colour quality and compression size. Both Gif and Png file formats can also be used, but Jpg images offer the best all round solution and will load faster on your website.
Before you upload your images to your site you should consider the overall file size for each image. For most websites an image size of between 250 and 350 pixels is the most popular. If you wish to use larger size images make sure that the resolution is compressed by using image compression software. This will help you to reduce the overall size and still retain a high quality image.
Optimise your website code
Many websites contain bloated or unnecessary code which can slow down the loading of a particular web page. Try validating your code using the W3C Validation Service. This will help you to identify possible errors in your code that are preventing your web pages from loading correctly.
Use Java Script files sparingly on your website as they contain lots of white space and other non related characters that are not required to run a particular script. Just like images, it is possible to remove any unwanted characters and reduce the file size drastically, which will help to make your web pages load faster.
Minimise HTTP requests
Http requests are messages that your web browser needs to send to the server in order to locate the correct page to display in your browser. If your web code contains a number of links to external resources that need to be displayed on the page, such as an image, then the browser will need to send further requests in order to find and display those images on your web page. Therefore the browser may need to send a number of requests in order to display a single web page correctly. Obviously, minimising these Http requests will help to speed up the load time of your web page.
Server issues
If after reducing the file size of your images and optimising your code you are still having problems it is possible that the issue may be with your web hosting provider. The majority of webmasters tend to purchase the most affordable hosting package which is likely to be on a shared web hosting basis. This type of hosting package can sometimes have implications for web page loading speeds, compared to virtual private server hosting or dedicated server hosting, which of course will be more expensive. It is worth contacting your hosting company when you have any questions or issues with regards to the speed of your website, as they may be able to help you or at least offer you valuable advice.
Google provide a free tool to enable you to check if your site will meet the new page loading speed requirements. You will receive a report that will highlight the areas that you need to improve in order to make your site load faster. This free tool can be accessed at Google PageSpeed Insights.
It is important to understand that every page may load at a different speed; therefore you will need to check every page, not just your Home page.
If your site is suffering from slow web page loading speeds, then by following these useful tips you should be able to improve the load times to a more acceptable level. However, there are many other options to improve your speed, but these may require expert technical assistance.
We hope that you have enjoyed reading this article on How To Improve Your Websites Page Loading Speed.
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