Page speed is becoming a bigger and bigger factor in SEO. Google is putting much more relevance on it because people simply don’t want to stay on a slow site. In fact, Google has said that mobile pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load lose over half their visitors.

If they leave your website, they’re going to go straight to your competitors. That makes page speed critical to the overall health of your website. Here’s how you can improve it.

How to Improve Page Speed on the Front-end

The front-end of your website is the part that everyone sees. It chiefly contains the design and uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Improving page speed here chiefly involves making everything load quicker.

1. Optimize fonts and images

Fonts and images can make your site look great. But they can really slow it down, too, if they aren’t implemented properly.

Don’t go mad with fonts. Try and restrict your choice to ones that can be embedded as an inline SVG. This means they will load as fast as possible. An even better method would be to use Google Web Fonts which are usually already saved on servers and can be loaded instantly.

Images should be as small and as compressed as possible. The bigger the image, the longer it takes to load so make sure to minify them as much as possible without losing quality.

2. Minify your JavaScript and CSS

As well as shrinking your images, you may also want to shrink your code. This isn’t a good idea unless you are a web developer and you know what you’re doing. But by minifying your CSS and JavaScript you can significantly decrease load times.

3. Choose a content delivery network

Content delivery networks store a version of your site on worldwide servers in the form of a cache. In doing so, they serve up this version of your website much faster than it would take to load the page from scratch meaning that everyone across the world can load your site quickly

How to Improve Your Page Speed On The Back-end

The back-end of your website is much more technical than the front-end and so are the ways in which to increase site speed.

1. Set up a reverse proxy and HTTP headers

You can use a reverse proxy in the same way that you would use a CDN, to cache pages and serve them up to visitors. The benefit here is that you keep everything in house.

The same can be done for your HTTP headers.

2. Prolong the TTL of your cache

Caches aren’t stored forever. After a certain amount of time they are wiped and need to be renewed. But you can increase the time to live or TTL of your caches so that they last for much longer meaning web pages should load quicker in general.

3. Get a slow queries report

Your database can provide you with a slow queries report which will identify things you need to improve.

For more information on increasing site speed, get in touch with our team today.

Ways to Improve Your Page Speed