You want to improve the page speed of your website? - Good idea. You do not know how? - Then you've come to the right place. Pagespeed optimizations are much discussed in our industry. People speculate, try things out.
We from appleute give you the most important proven measures to improve page speed in this blog article.
WordPress currently holds a market share of more than 60 % in the field of content management system (CMS) providers. Many of our customers rely on WordPress. The following paragraphs on Page Speed are written for users of all CMS and are especially useful for users of WordPress.
A Microsoft study showed that the average human attention span (especially when using computers and phones) has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in recent years.
This means that you have about 8 seconds to show your visitors the content of your website and convince them to stay on the page and interact with it. Imagine that it takes 4 seconds for your website to load. It only takes another 4 seconds for a potential customer to leave your site. Personally, I get annoyed when a page doesn't load after 2 seconds. I get frustrated easily and visit another website.
A study by Pingdom found an average load time of 3.21 seconds (2018). To get an idea of what good or bad page speeds are, we recommend this article by SEO Southwest.
There is a direct negative correlation between page speed and bounce rate (e.g. Pingdom) who are potential leads but move away from your website without engaging with it in the first place.
So if you want to attract new customers, reducing loading time is crucial:
Not only will your visitors move away from your website, but in addition, slow websites will be downgraded by Google, Bing, etc. in their SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This means that slow websites rank lower and get fewer visitors. Less exposure means less attention. Poor page speed can trigger a downward spiral that is detrimental to the success of your online business.
Google, with 86 % clearer Market leader in the search engine pool strictly: if the Page Speed is bad, the devaluation and downgrading occurs. In fact, Google uses them a threshold for Page Speed. It is important to be below this threshold. It decreases from year to year, Google's expectations increase. By setting the page speed threshold low, they set the bar high for you.
To find out how well your website is performing, you can find a variety of page speed tools on the World Wide Web. Many tools are free of charge.
The best solution available, in our opinion, is a service called Pingdom. Pingdom is a free online tool that checks the loading of websites from different locations around the world. Pingdom also tells you the causes of your website's slowdowns. Google also offers a free tool called Page Speed Insights which offers the same range of functions as Pingdom.
Page speed testing on desktop is important. However, don't forget to test the page speed on different devices, such as your smartphone. Here we can recommend the following tools:
The page speed tests mentioned above provide recommendations that could optimize your website. Unfortunately, these recommendations will be difficult to understand for all those who don't have a background in web development.
Don't worry about it! Because even regardless of your background, you can diagnose and perform page speed optimizations.
For you, we have worked out a short list of the most common reasons for a slow website:
Now that you know the potential reasons for a slow website, we will look at the 3 Quick Fixes anyone can do quickly to dramatically improve page speed. For this you will need no more than an hour.
Images are a major draw for website visitors. However, if your images are not properly compressed, they can also look off-putting quite quickly. Uncompressed images are the main cause of slow page speed in all content management systems and platforms. So, to avoid falling into the same trap, do the following:
Try to keep the image size below 120 kilobytes for all your main images. You can easily see the current size by hovering over the file on your desktop or files.
If the current file size should be over 120 kilobytes, go ahead and edit the images. There is a whole range of compression tools- just choose the one that best suits your needs. Compressor.io is recommended, or you can choose one from the Mashable tools list off. Regarding the file format, we recommend sticking to SVG format.
Traditionally, websites are dynamic. Dynamic means that whenever a visitor enters your website, content (images, blog posts) is created on the fly. This results in each request going through a certain complex process. For example, WordPress uses PHP to work and MySQL to store the information about a website. Your web browser reads the MySQL database and PHP files and translates them into HTML content that is displayed to the visitor. You can imagine that requests can take some time and therefore slow down your website, especially if several hundred people visit your website at the same time.
This problem is not new. There is a basic trick to reduce the total weight of those requests. It's called caching and it helps you speed up your website's page speed by 2-5 times.
What caching does: Instead of generating and loading a new page every time the same user lands on your website, caching plugins create copies of the assembled pages when a visitor is on your website for the first time. Loading the same user's page in the future will be easy and fast, as all (except updated) website elements are already stored.
There are a variety of caching plugins available. We recommend that you take a look at the aThemes shortlist for the best ratings.
Without a solid foundation, it's hard to scale. This is also the case when building websites - a web host with proper quality can make all the difference.
When you choose a shared server, you share the same server with other websites. This can get complicated if the other websites have high traffic or are misconfigured, as this will affect the server's performance globally. This, in turn, can become a problem for you.
If the Compress your images (STEP 1) and Caching (STEP 2) do not reduce page load times to a maximum of 2 seconds, you should contact your web host to host your website on its own dedicated server. Alternatively, make the switch to another provider.
To cut to the chase: If you manage to perform these three quick fixes on your website, step by step you will notice the difference from before. If you have a lot of traffic on your site and you think that page speed is essential for your site performance, you should take on additional optimizations. These will include advanced technical fixes that can be implemented without development assistance, on the one hand, and deep fixes that require support from Web developers required.
appleute builds and supports online projects. Get in touch!
AppLeute GmbH is an AI transformation company for B2B service SMEs in the DACH region whose operational processes have overtaken their existing tools. We support you in reliably mapping complex processes with the right software and AI
EN 
DE 
FR 
ES