When you built a new website for your brand, you spend days and weeks over the design, production, and countless edits.
But suddenly you encounter a problem that your new beautifully designed website has slow loading speed.
Speed is an essential factor when it comes to search engine optimization and conversion rate.
If your website speed is slow, people will bounce faster than conversions. But, making your website fast is not an easy task.
Sometimes it’s difficult to diagnose the issue; it could be large page elements to poorly written code.
But all you need to do is, identify and fix these problems fast.
To check your website speed, run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
If the score is 100%, your site speed is fast.
The faster your website loads, you have a better chance of Google ranking and lower bounce rate.
Google offers this free tool to analyze your site’s speed, but they don’t give you the instructions on making a 100% score.
Here are ways to score a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights and why your page speed is so important?
Why is page speed so important?
Page speed is an important ranking factor when it comes to Google’s search engine results.
If your website isn’t on the first page, most people won’t click on the second page. It’s not so strange that the top 10 results will get more clicks.
Backlinko surveyed ranked websites to figure out factors of top 10 results. They analyzed over 1 million search engine results pages on Google and found that page load speed was a basic factor in website ranking.
The top-ranking websites on Google had the same thing in common: fast page speeds and very low bounce rates compared to 2nd or 3rd-page results.
If your page takes 10 seconds to load, the likelihood of leaving your site increases by more than 120%.
Backlinko graph shows that the top-ranking websites’ speed on Google’s first page is less than 3 seconds.
According to Google, the average load time for most sites is over 8-11 seconds. In comparison, the best-speed website loads less than 3 seconds.
Causes of a page to load slowly:
- Heavy images: It is a good idea to optimize your images to take up less space. Best practices show the total size of a page should be less than 500KB.
- Poorly-designed coding:
Google shows that a 1.49MB page took 7 seconds to load.
Suppose I say about a perfect 100% score on Google’s PageSpeed tool; it’s not an easy task. You won’t get results overnight.
All you have to do is, work hard. If you want to traffic and more revenue, you must do it.
It may be tedious and tiresome, but you can’t be lazy and risk revenue and traffic on the table.
These are 4 ways to make your site speed score a perfect 100% with Google.
Image compression
One of the main reasons for slow pages is large image sizes.
The top optimization strategy to fix your image size is “compression.”
If you use WordPress, then “WP Smush Image” is the best plugin to optimize and compress your images.
It is one of the fastest tools, and you can smush up to 50 images simultaneously.
Browser caching
Fetching the resources to load your website takes much effort, such as
- Loading each image & page element
- Heavy HTML & coding
Whenever someone loads your site, this process is repeated. Automatically, it will have slow loading. Here you need the help of a tool, browser caching.
Browser caching is a tool that can make a big impact on page speed. It remembers the previously-loaded resources, so make it fast to load each time the same visitors come.
But how it works? When a visitor comes to a new page on your website, your logos, data, and footers don’t need to load again. It will result in a faster loading speed.
The best plugin to use in WordPress is W3 Total Cache. It involves no expert coding at all.
Minimize HTML space
Another big factor in getting a perfect speed score is minifying the space your HTML coding takes up. It is a process of fixing and removing duplicate and unnecessary data without impacting HTML.
It involves removing, fixing, shortening, and formatting unused code when possible.
In WordPress, the best tool to do all this is HTML Minify. Even if you aren’t a coding expert, you can easily do that.
Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
It’s a Google-implemented project to help pages load faster on mobile.
Page speed is an important part of websites. Stats from KISSmetrics shows that 40% of people leave pages that take more than 3 seconds to load.
The AMP plugin was made out of a collaboration between Twitter and Google.
In simple words, AMP is an open-source initiative project designed to optimize and speed up mobile pages.
This plugin takes a mobile-friendly page and loads quicker by stripping it down to basics. Users will have a streamlined experience on mobile.
You might have seen AMP articles when you browse the Internet on your mobile phone. For example:
In Google search results, AMP articles are often related to the “Top Stories” section, and they load faster.
If you click on any of AMP articles, the content will look like this:
This feature streamlines the user experience on mobile.
AMP is safe to increase mobile speed and conversion. It also allows you to score 100% on Google’s PageSpeed.
If you’re not familiar with HTML, try using a WordPress plugin, “AMP for WP.”
With over 80,000 active installations, AMP provides updates and constant support. It’s a proven and safe way to speed up your mobile site.
Bottom Line
When you build a new website, you spend countless days, weeks, and months to make it look perfect.
No doubt, every image, icon, logo, and element must be of top-notch quality.
But that often makes your website speed slower than Google’s best practices.
The speed of your site also plays a huge impact when it comes to driving conversions.
Nobody likes to wait 10-15 seconds for a site to load when choosing to click back to Google and select another website.
Google is all about providing a perfect user experience. But if your site speed is slow in Google’s record and it sees people bouncing, they will lower your website ranking.
It should be one of your top priorities when trying to optimize your website.
Diagnose the issues, whether it’s images, poor coding, text, page elements, or all of the above!
It’s a good idea to check your website speed in Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Your best score should be 100% or close to that.
Check Google PageSpeed Insights tool’s reports to figure out your next steps.
Start with image compression, optimization with a Plugin.
To leverage browser caching, use plugins that help your site use fewer server-based requests and load faster.
The next step is to minimize your coding. It will help you fix unnecessary coding that impacts the speed of your site.
The last step is implementing AMP to make your web pages load faster.
These strategies can help you score a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Now let us know if you have any other way to increase your website speed?
