If you own a small or medium business, your website could be one of the most potent tools for showcasing your products and services, inviting customers to your doorstep, and driving sales. However, if your website is slow, you may lose valuable visitors before they see what you offer. Your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy should prioritize increasing website page speed.

Unfortunately, many business owners unknowingly commit mistakes that end up hurting their website’s page speed. In this article, you’ll learn about common website optimization errors and how to fix them to ensure your site runs as fast as possible.

Website page speed and user experience

So why does page speed matter? It’s because people do not like waiting for unnecessarily long periods. Think of how impatient people can get while waiting for a traffic light to change or how quickly they switch lanes on a fast-moving highway.

The same goes for internet browsing. Users often correlate speed with the quality of their experience—the faster a web page loads, the better.

In general, website visitors expect your pages to load within three seconds. Any longer, and they’d move on to comparable but faster alternatives, which are likely your competitors. But even if they stay, making them wait can affect other key metrics. For one, a single second of extra wait time can decrease your conversions by 7%.

Furthermore, Google introduced page speed as a ranking factor for desktop and mobile searches in 2010 and 2018, respectively. Thus, increasing your website’s page speed can make it more visible and discoverable to potential customers.

Website optimization errors that affect page speed

Without knowing it, you could be committing mistakes that negatively impact your website page speed. These are the errors you should avoid and technical SEO tips to resolve them:

Leaving large images uncompressed

High-quality visuals are essential for a great user experience and make your site more attractive. However, large, unoptimized images take longer to load, so using them can significantly slow down your website.

When uploading images to your website, compress them using tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim. This reduces their size but not their quality. You should also consider using modern formats like WebP, which are smaller in size than traditional formats like JPEG and PNG.

Ignoring browser caching

When users visit your website, their browser downloads files like images, stylesheets, and scripts from your servers to display them. Browser caching stores these elements on the user’s device so that they don’t need to be re-downloaded the next time that user returns to your site, expediting loading times.

There are several ways to set up browser caching. One of these is to use plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache if you’re running a site with WordPress. You can also take advantage of content delivery network (CDN) services that offer browser caching, such as Cloudflare and Akamai.

Overusing plugins and widgets

Too much of anything is never good, and that’s true for plugins on your WordPress website. While they can be incredibly helpful for adding useful features that enhance user experience, using more than necessary can bog down your website. Similarly, too many widgets, like pop-ups and embedded social media feeds, can slow down your pages as well.

To prevent excess and unnecessary plugins and widgets from weighing down your site, audit your plugins and widgets regularly. Remove outdated ones and those you don’t use or need, and try to find lightweight alternatives for those that significantly increase your website’s loading times.

Neglecting mobile optimization

With most web traffic nowadays coming from mobile devices, failing to optimize your website for mobile can be a costly mistake. More than half of mobile users will abandon your website if it doesn’t finish loading after three seconds. Also, 70% of them won’t be inclined to return after leaving.

Use Google’s website speed test, also known as PageSpeed Insights, to assess your site’s mobile performance. This test also provides recommendations on how to improve your website’s mobile speed, such as optimizing images and reducing server response times.

If you are creating a new website or redesigning your current one, it’s helpful to use a mobile-first approach to development. This strategy focuses on optimizing your site’s design and functionality for mobile devices before considering desktop users. It covers tactics like implementing simple navigation and a mobile-responsive design.

Avoiding using a CDN

A CDN can help speed up your website in more ways than enabling browser caching. It distributes your website’s assets to servers across different geographical areas. When a visitor visits your website, their browser downloads your site’s assets from the server closest to their location. This reduces the data transfer distance, which affects loading times.

Implementing a CDN is especially helpful if your website has visitors worldwide. It also reduces the load on your server, helping it to run faster and smoother.

Forgetting to minify code

Your website is powered by code, such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments in this code can make your site’s files larger, which takes longer to download. Minifying your code removes these unnecessary elements, making your website faster.

You can use tools like UglifyJS and CSSNano to minify Javascript and CSS, respectively. WordPress also has plugins that automatically minify your website’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript files.

Skipping regular speed tests

The issues impacting page speeds aren’t always readily apparent, and finding them early means you can fix them before they cause any significant negative impact on your site. Use tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to conduct regular website speed tests.

Using cheap or shared hosting

Your hosting provider plays a crucial role in your site’s performance. Cheap or shared hosting services may seem like a good deal, but they often come with limited resources. This can lead to slow loading times and even crash your website during high-traffic periods. Consider investing in a reliable hosting service or upgrading your current plan to ensure your website has ample resources to handle traffic.

A fast-loading website isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have if you want to market your business effectively to potential customers online. By avoiding the above mistakes, you can ensure that your website is optimized for speed, providing a positive user experience and improving your search engine rankings.

If you don’t know where to start, consider hiring a professional technical SEO agency. They can assess your site’s speed and performance, identify issues, and provide recommendations on optimizing it for maximum efficiency. Don’t let slow loading times hold back the success of your website—partner with an SEO agency today and improve your website’s speed!

Most Internet users dislike waiting. When they land on your website, they expect your web pages to finish loading almost instantly. If it takes longer than three seconds, most visitors will leave for your competitors’ sites and never return. This is why you need to implement browser caching as a way of boosting your website’s page speed.

Browser caching to speed up site loading

When visitors arrive on your website, their browsers download all the files necessary to display the page, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. This process can take time, especially if your web page has a lot of content or uses heavy media files. The more files and the larger they are, the longer it takes for your web page to load.

Browser caching stores these files on the visitor’s browser the first time they visit your website. When they return, their browser “remembers” your site and retrieves the stored files instead of downloading them again from your servers. This significantly reduces the time it takes to load your web page.

Fast pages for user experience and site ranking

A fast website provides visitors with a smooth experience; slow loading can frustrate and leave them dissatisfied with your business. If they are happy with your site, they are less inclined to go and more likely to interact with your other content. You also get more opportunities to convert them into paying customers the longer they stay.

Additionally, website page speed is one of the key factors Google considers when ranking sites on its results pages. Faster websites rank highly and are more visible to users, so improving loading speeds can positively impact your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).

Here are statistics proving why it’s crucial that your site loads quickly:

83% of Internet users expect websites to load entirely in no more than three seconds.

40% of visitors will abandon a website if it doesn’t load within three seconds. The figures are higher for mobile users.

Websites that load within five seconds have a 38% bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave immediately). In comparison, those that load in two seconds only have 9%.

79% of online shoppers are less likely to return after experiencing poor website performance.

Every second of page load time can lower your conversion rates by over 2%.

Even with high-quality content, visitors may leave your website if it doesn’t lead quickly enough. This is why increasing website page speed is one of the priorities of technical SEO, which focuses on ensuring your site runs smoothly.

Website audits for checking page speeds

Before diving into browser caching, you need to learn how to assess your site’s current page speed. This will help you identify which areas of your website need improvement and how effective browser caching might be. Thankfully, page speed checker tools like Google PageSpeed Insights make this easy to accomplish.

Alternatively, you can conduct a complete website audit. Unlike a page speed checker, which provides limited data, a full website audit gives you an in-depth list of issues impacting your website’s speed, such as broken links and tech SEO errors. It can also include recommendations for improving loading speeds and highlight areas where browser caching can make a difference.

Multiple ways to implement browser caching

Implementing browser caching may sound complex, but it’s actually simpler than you think. There are several ways to do it, and which works for you depends on factors like your hosting and website platform.

If your website runs on WordPress, you can use plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to enable browser caching. These plugins are designed to automate the process and be user-friendly, so you can use them without manually editing any code. This makes them easy to use even if you’re not very tech-savvy.

If your site runs on Apache servers, you can add a specific code to your .htaccess file to set an expiration time for different types of files. For example, you might instruct the browser to cache images for six months or JavaScript files for one month. Setting a limit is necessary to ensure that visitors always receive the latest version of your website, even when you make updates.

You can also use browser caching offered by a content delivery network (CDN) service. CDNs store your website’s files on multiple servers across the globe, which helps speed up your site further by ensuring your site’s data is downloaded from the servers closest to your visitors. The closer servers are to your users, the faster they can download your website.

A fast website is necessary for a strong Internet presence and reputation. Browser caching is a straightforward way to boost your site’s speed, so it’s worth including in your tech SEO strategy. Thankfully, there are many ways to implement it, even without extensive technical knowledge.

Alternatively, you can hire a professional technical SEO agency to manage the behind-the-scenes aspect of your website. An agency has tech and SEO experts who can analyze your website and recommend the best ways to optimize it for speed and monitor its performance.

Keep visitors and search engines happy by investing in technical SEO today!

Tag: page speed audit

Common Page Speed Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Website