Online business owners work day and night to perfect their SEO strategies. However, if the site takes too long to load, all efforts may be in vain. In this digital world, people have few options. If the website is slow, it will have a bad user experience. Users will then go to the competitor’s site within a few minutes. Not only that, it can also hurt your ranking. Google is smart enough to make page speed a ranking factor. Fortunately, there are plenty of proven tactics to help your website load faster and increase your Google Pagespeed score.
But before you start, it is essential to know the website’s current speed. It helps in creating a strategy accordingly.
How can we check this speed? Google provides a tool for it called Google Pagespeed Insights.
Let us see how can we use it:
Google Pagespeed Insights
It is a tool that measures the speed of your website. After checking the site, it will give you a score between 0 and 100.
Here, 100 is the best, and anything above 90 is ideal.
In addition, the color coding feature makes it easy to understand the message within minutes.
You will receive one of the results below:Green: Okay
Yellow: Needs improvement
Red: Bad
The best feature of the tool is its feedback. It provides suggestions that you can implement to increase your page speed.
Most importantly, the tool works for both desktop and mobile versions.
5 Techniques to Improve Your Google PageSpeed Score
Once you know where your site is, it’s time to discover useful strategies. Some of these include:
1. Image optimization
Images are perfect for engagement and avoiding them can ruin your online identity. However, larger images take up a lot of space and increase the loading time of the website.
Optimization can help you solve this problem. You can optimize every image, whether it is an original image or a photo.
Small business owners on a tight budget always choose images from affordable stock photo sites. But to take advantage of SEO, they optimize it perfectly.
You can also optimize the image in the following ways:
Compress images
Compressing images reduces their size and increases page speed. But be careful not to press too hard. It may degrade the image quality. For image compression, there are tools like Ezgif, JPEG.io, Compressor.io and many others.
Select the appropriate file format
Understand basic file formats and their uses. If you’re using graphic animations, GIFs are best.
Consider JPEG when image size is a priority and you’re willing to compromise on quality.
However, if you belong to a business where image quality is your main concern, PNG is the right choice.
Photo businesses usually consider PNG as their core product.
Use a CDN
A content delivery network delivers content at high speed regardless of the user’s geographic location. Fortunately, image CDNs are also present today. They store visuals on a global server. Images weigh less and load quickly.
2. Choose a reliable hosting server
Investing in a trusted hosting service is a wise decision. Although free web hosting can save your hard-earned money, it comes with the downside of time fluctuations.
Therefore, choose the hosting server closest to your target group. The right hosting plan also plays a key role in the performance of your website.
Shared hosting is a cost-effective solution, but it can slow down your site due to the presence of other sites.
A virtual private server, on the other hand, gives you optimal control over the elements affecting your website’s performance.
3. Use minifications
Minification is the process of compressing codes by removing unnecessary data. It is most useful when the Google Pagespeed Insights report suggests minification to increase site speed.
Here you need to remove various elements like line breaks, function names, comments, etc. This makes the code easier and faster to read, which reduces the loading time.
You can use this tactic to minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. If you are a beginner, the process may seem technical. However, there are many plugins that can help you. The most famous names are WP Fastest Cache, Autoptimize and Fast Velocity Minify.
4. Don’t use landing page redirects
When we use landing page redirects, our users go to a different web page than the one they intended. The result is spoiling the user experience and brand image.
Technological advances are undoubtedly changing the way we live. Today, people use multiple devices to visit our website.
However, it seems impossible to design a unique layout for each device. Responsive design is the only solution to this problem.
A design that can be adjusted according to the screen resolution automatically eliminates the need to use redirects.
5. Use browser caching
Before we understand the browser caching process, we need to look at what a cache is. It is a storage space where we can store data for a short interval.
Browser caching is the process by which the browser temporarily stores the resources of a web page.
Since the web browser stores such resources on the local disk, they are loaded quickly on subsequent visits.
But enabling this process seems a bit critical. Therefore, do not hesitate to seek professional advice.
Alternatively, you can edit. htaccess which is a risky option. Any single mistake in this code can cause you the opposite reaction.
Instead of reducing it, it can increase the load time.
Conclusion
In short, a fast loading website is essential to provide a commendable user experience. But increasing your website speed is not that difficult.
First, use Google Pagespeed Insight to find out your site’s score. And don’t forget to consider the suggestions.
Then, work on the tips mentioned above to improve your site speed. You can also take professional assistance for guidance on the technical side.
After all these changes, recheck your website’s score to determine the impact of the above tips. Good luck! Contact arslanashiq.dev to increase your website pagespeed score today.
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