Easy SEO: 4 Tips To Improve Your Page Speed.
An F1 car needs to be finely tuned, so does your website.
Welcome to Easy SEO, simple tips that you can implement to improve your website SEO!
Today’s topic, Page speed.
First off, what is page speed and why is it important? According to Moz, “Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads.” The Page Speed is determined two ways, either by the page load time or the time to first byte, the later referring to how long it takes a browser to receive the first “byte” of information from your site.
Google uses page speed as one of its key metrics used by its algorithms to rank and index website pages. This is backed up by Moz research that has shown Google might be specifically measuring time to the first byte as when it page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means a poor user experience (particularly on mobile) and means fewer pages crawled by search engines, all resulting in negative indexation, aka poor search rankings!
Test your page speed here with Google's PageSpeed Insights. But what do you do if you get a bad result? Or if you just want to improve your page speed? Use these 7 tips as a checklist to optimise your sites page speed.
1 - Enable Site File Compression
Compress your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes. You can use compression tools like Gzip.
2 - Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
One of the quickest and most effective ways to improve site speed is to remove spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters like code comments, formatting, and unused code. If you’re on a WordPress site it’s really easy to install a minify plugin that will quickly minify your site code. We recently did this for a client and it resulted in a 2000 page view increase per month! For other sites and including WordPress sites, Google recommends using CSSNano and UglifyJS. It is important to note that minification can damage template sites like those used in Squarespace and Wix for example.
3 - Reduce redirects
Page redirects increase waiting time for your users and should be avoided where possible. In cases where they must be used, ensure that there is only a maximum of one redirect at a time and that the user isn’t being bounced around your site with redirects. Sometimes CMS sites will set up automatic temporary redirects, so make sure if you change something on your site that you’re updating all the links to direct links to redirects.
4 - Optimise Images on your site.
Ensure that your images are as small as possible on your site. That doesn’t mean that they should be pixelated but ensure that your images are no larger than they need to be. One trick that you can use for high-resolution imagery is to reduce the image quality to 70% of the original. Your eyes can’t tell the difference on screens, and any increase in quality is only causing your site to run slower than it needs to. Trust us, we specialise in high-end photography and videography, and our images are only 70% of their original resolution on our site.
If you’re using a CMS like Squarespace make sure your images fit the size suggestions as they will automatically compress your images to ensure they’re not slowing your site down. For graphics, transparent PNGs are generally prefered while JPEGs are better for photos.
We hope you enjoyed our Easy SEO: 4 Tips To Improve Your Page Speed blog. Let us know what you think of the blog in the comments section, and if you’d love to have insights like this delivered to your inbox subscribe to the Pulp Media newsletter!
If thinking about SEO gives you a headache feel free to reach out to us directly at hello@pulpmedia.com.au and we can help you out with a free SEO assessment.
