Ways to Speed Up Your Website

The saying that reads “time is money” finds its maximum realization right on the internet. On the Web, in fact, the loading times of a site become fundamental for its effectiveness. The longer the waiting time increases and the higher the percentage of users leaving the site is high: for sites that have a loading time of more than 4 seconds the percentage of abandonment is 25% and rises to 50% if the average time exceeds 10 seconds. As well as for user experience, having a performing site can also affect the page ranking for search engines. In fact, since 2018, Google orders the results of the SERP also analyzing how much it takes to load a page. In orden not to lose the priority of the first search page you need to make the most effort to optimize the speed of your pages in favor of the user and the search engine at the same time.

How long should the average loading time be?

It is precisely Google itself that gives us the answer; according to a study in fact the maximum limit should be 3 seconds. A higher loading time could in fact lead the user to abandon the page perhaps addressing a competitor. Often the creator does not pay attention to this particular so small yet so important as a ranking parameter.Often, however, you are not aware of the exact loading time of your site: here then comes into play the tools for page load time. Services such as Test My Site or PageSpeed Inside are able to detect, through the URL or the domain of the pages, the performance of the site and often also provide advice on which sections should be optimized for each type of device.

Tips to improve your page speed

As already mentioned, there are many factors that determine the speed of the page, and in general of the web site. Now we will review some of the most important ones to give advice on how to improve them, for giving the site an ideal speed.

• Images: it is recommended to use images that are not too large and heavy. Better to use a compressed format like JPEG that affects the quality but certainly speeds up loading.
• Font: according to some studies, too articulate fonts affect the page-speed and often are not even displayed correctly;
• Flash and JavaScript content: animations and implementations can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they improve the site but an abuse can only make it less performing. For this it is advisable to use HTML5.
• HTTP requests: you need to reduce the number of files that generate an HTTP call such as CSS files or Display advertisements.
• Evaluate lazy loads and pages with AMP: Slow loading of images and videos saves resources and allows the above the fold to respond in minimum time because the upload is not connected to the media of the entire page.
• Enable GZIP compression: GZIP compression for all HTTP requests can greatly reduce the time required to provide a response to the browser.
• Define the browser cache: better to have the browser cache active so as to allow the storage of the previously recovered response in order to reduce the response time of the client. 

Avoid redirect chains on pages: if you have more than one redirect on a final destination page, you risk reduced loading times.