Why Is Site Speed Important?
In today’s digital age, users expect to receive information immediately. As a result, ensuring your website loads quickly is crucial for both SEO and user experience. Slow websites tend to give visitors a negative impression, leading them to have little interaction with the site.
How Does Site Speed Impact SEO?
A slow website often results in a poor user experience since visitors will likely spend less time on the site out of frustration and exit the site quickly. Since Google wants to keep its users happy, pages that have lower bounce rates and longer sessions tend to have a better ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).
Additionally, site speed is an important factor because it may increase conversions. When people spend time on a website, they do not have the patience to wait. If a page needs to load to make a conversion, there is a greater chance that a user will close the page and go to another site to purchase products or services. It is important to create a fast and easily navigable website to improve user experience and catch users when they are making their purchasing decisions.
What Can You Do to Speed Up Your Website?
As a website developer, you should utilize Google’s free PageSpeed Insights to monitor your load times. This tool will also provide you with suggestions that can help your page load faster. However, based on our experience, you should focus on three main goals.
Leverage browser caching
You can enable browser caching by editing your HTTP headers to set expiry times for files such as images and videos. By doing this, you will reduce the load on your server, thus decreasing the load time for your users.
Enable Compression
This method will decrease the time it takes for a website to transfer page files and style sheets, in turn increasing site speed. To enable compression, you will need to edit your .htaccess file to set up gzip/Brotli compression.
Remove unnecessary scripts and other actions
Often, 80% of a website’s CSS and JavaScript does not do anything but lengthen load times. By removing unused files and scripts that may be loading in the background, you can optimize your site for speed. To remove scripts from WordPress, you can utilize four functions: wp_deregister_script($handle), wp_dequeue_script($handle), wp_deregister_style($handle), wp_dequeue_style($handle).