Today, we will focus on a fundamental topic that unfortunately many ignore or underestimate: optimizing your website's speed.
First, let's ask ourselves "Why" this is so crucial. As usual, let's bring it down to real-life examples.
So, how can you optimize your website's speed to deliver exceptional user experiences and improve your SEO?
Imagine you're looking for an answer to a question on Google, and you find a title and description that entices you to click, but after about ten seconds, the page still hasn't loaded. What would you do?
Let's asnwer with the statistics at the hand.
You would likely leave and click on the next convincing result. - What happened? This is entirely normal considering that users' attention is fleeting, and website speed has become a more critical element than ever before.
A slow-loading website creates a double problem: it can frustrate visitors, leading to higher bounce rates, which means missed opportunities. But it's not just users who care about speed. Even more importantly, search engines like Google prioritize websites that load faster than others.
Having understood the foundations and importance of this topic, how can we optimize our website's speed to provide excellent service and help with our SEO strategy? Let's finally discover the five tricks of the trade.
Let's start with some technical stuff that might seem unfriendly to newcomers. We're going to rewind and begin by asking:
"What on earth is Cache?"
The Cache is a portion of memory dedicated by a browser (like Chrome or Safari) to store a website's pages, images, texts, scripts, and anything else that gets loaded during normal website browsing. These can then be retrieved in new and future visits by the same user without consuming internet bandwidth again.
In simple terms? This technique can significantly reduce loading times for visitors returning to the site or viewing another page containing materials they've seen previously.
So, how can you do this?
Since it's a highly technical topic, there are two options to consider.
The first is to understand this function and ask your developer to implement it, easy, done.
The second option, in case you like DIY, is possible if you use CMS systems like WordPress. In this case, you can "simply" download cache management plugins (like W3 Total Cache) and set them up to do their job. Otherwise, you'd need to check if your server offers such solutions.
If you're tech-savvy and enjoy programming, you might consider frameworks like Gatsby, which come with highly performant integrated cache management.
More technical stuff and another potential headache. But let's try to explain it simply.
When we visit any website, we read its content and enjoy its graphics, colors, and images. What we're actually doing is visiting a container of data, which behind the scenes, is a long text sheet full of code written in specific languages.
Here is where your technical skills or understanding of the topic come into play.
If you're an expert programmer, you know how to develop a website by writing it entirely by hand. You know how to streamline the code, simplify the scripts, and perhaps minify all the code to reduce it to a single long horizontal line.
If you're not that experienced but enjoy DIY, you'd likely use pre-set templates on various platforms like WordPress. In this case, using themes written by other programmers, which have to leave room for endless possibilities and variables to enable users to develop the site in "Drag and Drop" mode, it becomes very challenging to put your hands on the code to simplify it or reduce its complexity and weight.
In my opinion, in this case, we should accept that a pre-set template will always be slower than a hand-written and optimized site. There can be no battle (with possible SEO positions lost), but we could try to install one of the various plugins that WordPress offers as a solution, hoping it can help sufficiently to reduce the size of your code, minimize CSS, Javascript, and HTML, and automate processes like removing spaces, comments, and line breaks.
The only other option I see in this case is to increase the budget threshold and seek expert help.
Another technical topic, but perhaps this is the easiest to grasp.
Images are heavy if they're not saved in suitable formats. What does this mean? Imagine wanting to take a picture of your product with a cutting-edge smartphone. The result will be a beautiful photo, certainly full of details, contrasts, and perfect lighting.
There's just one small problem. Such an image will weigh several gigabytes, and if you check the specifications without too much surprise, you might discover that the dimensions are enormous. Larger than what the website itself could reach.
So, we need to optimize them before uploading them to our website. We need to resize and compress them without sacrificing too much quality to reduce the impact on loading time.
There are various tools to make this operation possible, from amateur ones to professional ones like Photoshop, to online (and free) tools like Photopea. It doesn't matter which one you choose to use, but it's essential to focus on the result you need to obtain.
From the moment you start managing your website, you have to deal with the hosting service. Yes, it is that fee that you have to pay for every year, that kind of computer that's always on, that physical space located somewhere in the world that "contains" your site and makes it available whenever someone wants to visit it. Pretty important, right?
Well, my advice here is to pay close attention when choosing your hosting service. Make sure it's a reliable service, well-equipped, with abundant resources, so it can significantly enhance your website's performance.
While an outdated and slow hosting service could compromise all your efforts, a modern and fast one can genuinely make a difference.
Want some recommendations? Good value for money: Hostgator, Siteground, Hostinger. Avoid, if possible (personal and subjective opinion), too small and local services.
And finally, if you aim to conquer the world, leveraging the power of an efficient content delivery network, consider CDN.
What is a CDN? The CDN is a Content Delivery Network, a system in which your website isn't loaded on a server only in Italy, for instance, but is distributed across various other servers worldwide.
A CDN helps minimize territorial latency, those tiny moments when data needs to travel super quickly through interconnected cables, and it improves loading times for users across the globe by shortening the distances.
Where can you find a CDN service? Naturally, by asking your hosting provider; they will handle everything for a small annual fee added to your regular hosting costs.
True, lots of technicalities, but I hope these explanations can be useful. So, in conclusion, by implementing these strategies, we can finally create super-fast websites that capture users' attention, reduce bounce rates, and improve search engine rankings.
Are we ready to put these steps into practice? Have a happy marketing!
Matteo is an experienced freelancer who serves as an outsourcing manager for multiple international projects. He has a passion for programming, content creatin, eating pizza, and developing innovative solutions. A native Italian, he resides in Bali and is a devoted family man and nature enthusiast. When he's not in front of the computer, you can likely find him trekking through the heart of a jungle or unwinding on a secred beach.
