In February of this year Google began testing slow to load warning labels on their searches by putting a red caution label under links that were slow to load. They have continued testing that further for mobile devices. If Google deems the pages of your website to be slow to load and the person who searched for you is on a mobile device they are now warned with a small yellow caution label.
With consumers need for things to be instant ever increasing this could be a bad sign for your business. So today we are going to go over a few ways to increase the loading speed of your web pages.
Google have made their “Make The Web Faster” tools available to the public so you can improve your pages speed. You can analyze your web pages speed with PageSpeed Insights which then gives you some suggestions on how loading speeds could be improved. PageSpeed Modules is another way to improve loading times. You run the module and the tool automatically rewrites and optimizes your resources so that your site runs as efficiently as possible. They also allow you to make use of their infrastructure by leveraging Google’s public DNS to improve speed and security.
Google’s tools are a great help, however there are also several other ways in which you can improve the speed of your web page such as implementing a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN’s take static files such as CSS files or images and delivers them to servers closer to the user. As the servers are closer to the user it loads faster for them.
You can also reduce your sites load times by reformatting images so that they are smaller. About 60% of a websites data on desktop is imagery. So if you play around with different size and different quality images you can really make a difference.
If you are finding that your page is still slow to load after implementing these factors it may be time to evaluate your plugins. Yes plugins can be extremely important to your site, but they also add to the workload when trying to properly load up a page. By evaluating your plugins and only using the ones that you really need you can drastically improve your sites performance.
Another method to decrease your load times is to minify HTML, Javascript and CSS. To do this you simply have to erase all unnecessary comments, white space & code. This makes the file smaller and therefore easier to load. Google’s PageSpeed Insights can suggest several tools to do this for HTML, Javascript and CSS.
If you have done all of the above and you are still having slow load speeds it may be time to consider reviewing your hosting provider and package. On a normal shared hosting account you could be sharing with many other companies which affects the speed of everyone who shares it. If this is the case it may be time to consider dedicated hosting where you alone have access to the VPS (Virtual Private Server).
The speed that your web page loads at is important for both your consumers and your Google rankings. But even if you see the dreaded caution mark pop up next to your website these tips should help you get back on track.