The position of your website in search results is very important for your business to succeed. It's worth being aware that a number of steps will need to be taken to achieve this. Today we will look at what is website performance optimization.
What is page load speed?
Page load speed, is one of the indicators that determines how quickly your website will be displayed to the user after typing its web address or clicking on a link, for example, in a search engine. The rule is simple, the faster the page load time, the better.
This indicator has a huge impact on the success of your site and business, both technically and in terms of user experience. It has a big impact on conversion, i.e. the actions that result in a passive user taking an activity, such as making a purchase in an online store or subscribing to a newsletter. The relationship between loading speed and conversion is very high.
Page load speed and conversion in practice
To prove that it's not just a theory, let's show the evidence - the company Walmart, which is a U.S. supermarket chain that has been in business since 1962. In the stores you can buy basically anything. The company, by improving website performance and loading speed by 1 second, improved conversion by as much as 2 percentage points. On the surface, this seems like a small increase, but when converted to the number of orders placed by users, the result becomes impressive.
Another interesting example can be found in Google, which is known to all. Conducting extensive analysis of the results, the giant came to the conclusion that all it takes is for the page loading speed to drop by just 0.5 seconds, and this result translates into a clear 20% drop in conversions.
How to check the loading speed of a website?
If you want to check how fast your site loads, just use the tools available on the Internet. Their advantage is that they are easy to use, just paste the address of the site, confirm and after no more than a minute get the necessary information.
PageSpeed-Insights
One of the tools with which you can check the performance of your site is the free one provided by Google - PageSpeed Insights. The tool is very simple to use, just enter the site address and wait a while for the analysis. The advantage of the tool is that it displays information separately for the version of the page displayed on a computer and for the mobile version.
The collected information is displayed against a background that, depending on the rating, is in green, orange or red. What does this mean? Data marked on a green background is rated as very good, orange, as average, requiring possible modification, and red - requiring absolute optimization and improvement.
Optimizing website performance - necessary actions
Proper website optimization requires proper knowledge and skills in editing the site's code. The basis, of course, is to make sure everything works properly. Then you need to pay attention to other elements of optimization as well.
One of the most important demands is graphics and their size. Images must not be too large, as loading them significantly increases the loading time of the entire site. In addition, remember to establish a hierarchy, the most relevant images must appear first, and then those that are off-screen. For graphic elements, also remember not to use GIF format. A far better solution for animations would be to use MPEG4 or WebM, as they are smaller in size, which has a beneficial effect on page loading speed. Companies that want to present their portfolio in the form of graphics or videos are better off opting for modern solutions. Two formats are worthy of attention - WebP and WebM. Their main advantage is the improvement of compression with no apparent loss in quality, which allows to increase their loading speed.
It is also of great importance to perform proper compression for text resources (such as website code). They should be compressed into gzip, deflate or brotli formats. Doing so makes it possible to reduce the amount of data transferred over the network.
Wanting to improve the performance of the site, it is also necessary to perform an analysis of the source code of the site, with particular attention to the minification of CSS and JavaScript scripts. It is worth trying to reduce their number to the necessary minimum. This practice reduces the loading time of subsequent files, and thus the page loads faster. This rule also applies to unnecessary scripts, it is worth ensuring that there are as few as possible.
The code of the site and its structure should be as clear, transparent and organized as possible, which will significantly affect not only the speed of loading the page, but will support the positioning activities.
These are only selected examples, but important principles are many more. That's why you should rely on people who know what they are doing and have years of experience. If you want professional service and assistance - contact us, and our staff will help dispel any doubts, solving your problems.The code of the site and its structure should be as clear, transparent and organized as possible, which will significantly affect not only the speed of loading the page, but will support the positioning activities.
These are only selected examples, but important principles are many more. That's why you should rely on people who know what they are doing and have years of experience. If you want professional service and assistance - contact us, and our staff will help dispel any doubts, solving your problems.