It can affect how quickly they can render and load web content. Network Constraints: Mobile networks, especially in certain regions, can be less stable and slower than wired broadband connections.

It leads to slower data retrieval, impacting mobile loading times. Responsive Design: Websites often employ responsive design to adapt to different screen sizes. However, this adaptation can introduce additional elements and complexity on mobile, potentially slowing the loading process.

Mobile Optimization: Some websites prioritize mobile optimization less than desktop, resulting in less efficient code and resource management for mobile users. It also affects their SERP rankings since Google uses a Mobile-first indexing algorithm. Browser Differences: Mobile and desktop browsers may have varying rendering capabilities and resource handling, affecting loading times.

Relying on a Single Speed Test Tool: There are many online speed test tools available, and each tool has its methodology, metrics, and limitations. Therefore, using only one tool may not provide a comprehensive or accurate picture of your website's speed.

Instead, you should use multiple speed test tools and compare their results to identify common issues and trends. Focusing on a Single Metric: Measuring website speed using a single metric can be misleading and may not provide an accurate picture of website performance.

It is essential to use multiple metrics to measure website speed and identify areas for improvement. Inconsistent Testing Conditions: Ensure consistent testing conditions across measurements.

Changes in network speed, cache status, or devices used can lead to unreliable results. Ignoring Real-world User Experience: Relying solely on lab data can be misleading.

Speed test tools provide valuable insights into your website's technical performance. However, they may not reflect how real users perceive your website's speed.

Not Considering Accessibility: Websites not accessible to people with disabilities can affect website performance and user experience. It is essential to ensure the website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.

A good website has many factors contributing to its overall performance, including its core web vitals, speed index, image optimization, and more. By optimizing these areas, you can improve your website's speed and overall user experience. Let us understand each of these best practices in detail:.

Core Web Vitals are a set of user-centric metrics introduced by Google to measure the overall performance of web pages. They focus on three key aspects: Largest Contentful Paint LCP , which measures loading performance, First Input Delay FID , which gauges interactivity, and Cumulative Layout Shift CLS , which assesses visual stability.

Now that you understand the Core Web Vitals metrics, let's debug them using Chrome DevTools. Step 1: Open Chrome DevTools and navigate to the "Performance" tab. Click the "Record" button to record a performance profile.

It will record all the events on your website, including the Core Web Vitals metrics. Step 2: Once you have recorded a performance profile, you can analyze it by looking at the waterfall chart. The waterfall chart shows you the load times of all the resources on your website, including the LCP.

You can use the "User Timing" section in the DevTools panel to analyze the FID. This section shows the time the browser takes to respond to user input. You can use the "Layout Shifts" section in the DevTools panel to analyze the CLS. This section shows you any unexpected changes in the layout of your website as it loads.

Step 3: Once you have analyzed the performance profile, you can identify any issues affecting your Core Web Vitals metrics. For example, if your LCP is slow, you can investigate the resource causing the delay and optimize it for faster loading times.

Step 4: After identifying the issues, you can make necessary changes to improve your Core Web Vitals metrics. These changes can include the following. Optimize Server Performance: Ensure your web server responds swiftly to user requests.

Choose a reliable hosting provider with low server response times. Minimize Render-Blocking Resources: Reduce the impact of render-blocking resources like CSS and JavaScript.

Use techniques like asynchronous loading and code splitting. Lazy Load Images and Videos: Implement lazy loading to defer the loading of non-critical images and videos until they enter the user's viewport.

It is advised to optimize your website for Interaction to Next Paint INP , which replaces FID in March Focusing on Core Web Vitals enhances the user experience by providing faster loading, smoother interactivity, and visual stability.

Speed Index measures how quickly the contents of a webpage become visually complete. It considers both the time to first render and the visual completeness of the page.

Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content: Load essential content first, especially above-the-fold elements, to ensure users can access meaningful content quickly. Optimize Critical CSS: Critical CSS contains styles necessary for initial rendering.

Extract and apply critical CSS to minimize render-blocking and enhance speed. Reduce Third-Party Scripts: Evaluate and limit third-party scripts, as they can significantly impact loading times. Use them sparingly and asynchronously.

A faster Speed Index results in quicker perceived loading times, directly improving user engagement and SEO. Image optimization involves compressing and delivering images to maintain quality while minimizing file sizes. Choose the Right Format: Select appropriate image formats JPEG, PNG, WebP based on the type of image.

WebP, for instance, provides high quality at smaller sizes. Resize Images: Scale images to the dimensions they will be displayed at. Oversized images unnecessarily increase load times. Use Compression: Utilize image compression tools to reduce file sizes without compromising quality.

It reduces bandwidth consumption. Proper image optimization reduces page load times, leading to improved user experience. Optimized images consume less data, making your site more accessible and usable, especially on mobile devices. Browser caching involves storing static resources locally in a user's browser so that they don't need to be reloaded whenever they visit your site.

Set Appropriate Cache Headers: Configure cache headers to specify how long resources should be cached. Use long expiration times for static resources. Leverage Browser Caching Plugin: If using a content management system, consider using caching plugins that facilitate effective browser caching setup.

Version Your Assets: Append version numbers to your asset URLs when you update them. It prompts browsers to fetch the latest version. Browser caching significantly reduces server load and speeds up page loading for returning visitors.

It enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and positively influences SEO ranking due to improved page speed. Optimizing CSS and JavaScript files involves removing unnecessary characters from code, such as whitespace and comments, to reduce file sizes.

To optimize CSS and JavaScript files, here are some best practices:. Minify Files: Remove unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from CSS and JavaScript files to reduce file sizes.

Concatenate Files: Combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one to reduce the number of requests. Implement Asynchronous Loading : Use async and defer attributes to load non-essential scripts asynchronously. Smaller file sizes and reduced render-blocking resources lead to quicker page loads, reducing bounce rates and improving rankings.

It provides an overall website speed score and identifies which pages perform optimally. Learn how to measure your CWV report using GSC. While GSC gives you an overall perspective, Quattr delves deeper into website speed optimization. Quattr improves upon GSC by providing speed index metrics missing from GSC.

It provides a comprehensive view of core web vitals and other important speed metrics, helping you understand your website performance holistically.

Once you know what pages need improvement, it's time to drill down to the specifics of what's causing the slowdown. That's where Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse come in. These tools precisely analyze what's causing the lag in website loading times. They provide specific insights, such as code that may slow down your site, unoptimized images, or unnecessary redirects.

These insights allow you to directly address the issues harming your website's speed. Next, you should start fixing the issues based on your findings. Once you have fixed the issues, you should validate these improvements through the Google Search Console. Return to Google Search Console and re-run the tests to ensure the issues are properly addressed.

If not, then follow the steps again to improve your website speed. Website speed optimization is an important part of any website's overall performance.

Following the best practices can help you improve your website's speed and user experience. However, with the tools like GSC, you can't get a comprehensive view of your website performance.

This is where Quattr's capabilities shine. Quattr underscores the most significant opportunities to enhance your website speed by providing a comprehensive and prioritized audit list.

It provides you with a unique perspective on your search competitors' website speeds, allowing you to gauge your performance against theirs effectively and make necessary improvements.

Quattr's precise and actionable recommendations guide you from where you are to where you should be—without squandering crucial resources.

Regular website speed tests are essential for ensuring optimal performance and user experience. Conduct a website speed test at least once a month or after significant content updates or design changes.

If your site experiences heavy, fluctuating traffic, consider weekly tests to ensure a smooth user experience. Yes, enhancing page speed directly results in faster website loading.

They all contribute to faster data delivery, decreased bounce rates, and improved user experience. Both website speed and quality content are important for SEO. Quality content is important, as it can attract visitors to your website and encourage them to stay.

However, if your website is slow, visitors may leave before they even have a chance to read your content. To achieve faster loading times, you must focus on various aspects. Optimizing these areas enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and boosts SEO rankings.

James Gibbons is the Senior Customer Success Manager at Quattr. He has 10 years of experience in SEO and has worked with multiple agencies, brands, and B2B companies.

He has helped clients scale organic and paid search presence to find hidden growth opportunities. James writes about all aspects of SEO: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

Quattr is an innovative and fast-growing venture-backed company based in Palo Alto, California USA. Quattr's AI-first platform evaluates like search engines to find opportunities across content, experience, and discoverability.

A team of growth concierge analyze your data and recommends the top improvements to make for faster organic traffic growth. Growth-driven brands trust Quattr and are seeing sustained traffic growth. Test drives are a live demo with an analysis of some of your top pages.

Generate comprehensive outlines for all types of pages quickly and share briefs with copywriters to scale content production. Create SEO-friendly H1 headings in minutes and drive traffic to your website. Discover hundreds of relevant keywords in seconds with our free AI keyword research tool.

Our AI SEO platform will analyze your website and provide you with insights on the top opportunities for your site across content, experience, and discoverability metrics that are actionable and personalized to your brand. No credit card needed. Share your details below to start a 2-week free trial.

Access all Content AI functions for up to 10 AI-scored URLs. Let our AI handle the hard work! AI SEO Suite Content AI Pricing Resources. Improve Discoverability Optimize Content Enhance Experience Core Web Vitals Search Console.

Enhance Experience. Use Cases. Free Tools. SEO Tools. H1 Heading Generator. Meta Description Generator. SEO-Friendly URL Generator. Title Generator.

AI Content Writing Tools. Stepwise Instructions Generator. Paragraph Generator. Content Brief Generator. The solution to deal with this issue is using CDN.

Basically CDN is a geographically distributed group of the server where you can transfer all the assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.

CDN cache all these files on servers closer to where your users are, reduce the heavy load on your website, and make your application faster. If your website makes a large number of HTTP requests then the web pages will take more time to load.

When a visitor wants to access these elements on your website it requires more HTTP requests and takes a long time to render the page. Firstly identify how many HTTP requests are there using the network tab in the chrome developer bottom left corner tool.

You can reduce the number of requests using some techniques such as…. To move and delete pages or to eliminate the issue of broken links you might be using redirects but these redirects create more HTTP requests and that negatively impact performance.

Redirects , slow down the pages and kill the performance of the website. Firstly you should detect all the redirects using some tools like Screaming Frog and then identify which one is not necessary on your website. Eliminate unnecessary redirects and just keep the important ones.

According to Google , the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed web content every day. The larger your files, the slower your pages will load.

Reducing the file size is a great technique to achieve better page speed so always try to compress files as many as possible. It reduces the HTTP requests and helps in making the website faster. GZIP is the most effective and common technique to compress the file.

It works well with types of files. You can enable GZIP and compress web pages, CSS, and JavaScript at the server level before sending them over to the browser. On the user side, a browser unzips the files and present the original content.

You can use the URL GZIP compression test to check if the GZIP is enabled on your site or not. Note: Do not GZIP images, PDF, or other binary data. These are already compressed so it will just waste the CPU resources. Another option: You can also use Brotli for compression which is fairly new but gaining popularity in the market.

When a user visits a website the elements get stored in temporary hard drive storage called cache. This process loaded the pages faster. Basically caching stores the current version of the website on the hosting and presents this version until the website is updated.

There is no need to send the database requests each time for cached pages. Setting up website caching depends on the platform your site is running on. If we talk about WordPress then you can use the plugins W3 Total Cache to enable caching easily. For static HTML site, you can enable caching by in your.

htaccess file. The database also makes a huge impact on the performance of the web application. CMS is packed with complex plugins that increase the database size and load time of the web page. WordPress CMS stores posts, comments, pages, and other forms of textual and encrypted data that takes a lot of storage.

The database gets crowded over time and it starts collecting garbage data such as comments in the spam queue, unapproved comments, post revisions, trashed items such as posts, and pages.

Get rid of all these garbage data and useless content. Limit, disable, and delete post revisions. Different CMS have different optimization techniques. For WordPress, you can consider WP-Optimize. Whether we talk about the company logo or we need to showcase the product to the customers, images play a major role in building a website.

It increases user engagement but they are usually large files and so it also slow down the speed of your web page. compress the images. You can use tools such as Compressor. io , JPEGmini , Kraken , WP Smush For WordPress , TinyPNG to compress the images without compromising its quality.

You can also use Optimus along with an API which focuses on a combination of both lossless and lossy image compression. We have discussed 8 techniques but there are still some techniques you should know in order to improve the performance of your web page.

You can improve the performance of your website by choosing the right hosting service, optimizing the fonts, using prefetch techniques Link prefetching, DNS prefetching, Prerendering , using minimalistic frameworks, hotlink protection and minimizing time to the first byte.

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More redirects mean more load on the server, which can increase loading time. As your site grows, these HTTP requests start to stack up and eventually create a noticeable delay between user click-throughs and actual page loading.

The good news is that many of the strategies in this guide, like using a CDN and minifying CSS and JS files, can help limit the number of HTTP requests you site makes. Learn more about reducing your website's HTTP requests. The more you can reduce file sizes without compromising quality, the better your website performance.

One of the most robust and reliable compression frameworks is Gzip, but other methods can also deliver reduced file sizes without impacting the user experience. If your CMS doesn't offer this feature, then consider installing a caching plugin.

The SiteGround Optimizer plugin is a great choice for an all-in-one optimization plugin, offering plenty of features for caching, image compression, frontend optimizations, and other features that can significantly speed up any WordPress website.

It's free and easy to use, and comes packed with premium features such as CSS, JavaScript and HTML minificaiton, GZIP compression, and several options for caching. Solve for errors by running free, external tools to track down outcomes and remove dead links.

According to data from Statista , the number of mobile internet users in the United States in amounted to That number is expected to grow to Not only are more people using mobile devices to access the internet — more people are using it as their preferred device type.

According to data from a HubSpot survey of over web traffic analysts in the U. As more users switch to mobile devices as their primary browsing and shopping mediums, speedy mobile sites are essential. A website builder can be a great option for quickly building and customizing a site.

But it can lack the infrastructure and features to help websites with complex issues like slow load times. If you don't have the time, resources, or experience to employ all the optimization strategies in this guide, consider migrating to a CMS.

The right content management system can significantly improve website performance by streamlining content retrieval and offering robust options to modify site operations. Some even come with a built-in CDN. JavaScript and CSS files are among the largest files on a website. They also count as individual HTTP requests.

So five JS files and five CSS files would require a total of 10 HTTP request. Another way you can reduce the size of your JavaScript and CSS files is minifying them.

This technique involves removing any unnecessary code like:. This will reduce file sizes and therefore load times. You can do this manually or use a minification tool. The longer it takes your domain name server DNS to respond, the longer your time to first byte TTFB and the slower your site loads.

Free online tools can determine where your DNS provider ranks compared to other offerings, which in turn helps pinpoint specific performance issues. Worth noting? In some cases, your hosting provider will also supply DNS services, while in others these two functions are separate.

The good news is many CMS platforms provide built-in features or plugins to enable asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript elements, which allows them to load simultaneously. To maximize page loading speed, use the fewest number of fonts possible, and focus on fonts that are optimized for speed.

And while it's imperative to improve these metrics through website optimization, you should also take care to place your users and potential customers at the heart of any decisions you take. The following are some weak points that may be preventing you from having an optimized website:.

According to Portent , the first five seconds of loading have the highest impact on conversion rates , as conversion rates drop 4. Make sure your visitors are finding value in your page by designing it to load as quickly as possible.

Do broken links hold them back from browsing other pages on your site? Bugs and broken links are simple fixes that can quickly improve website performance. Your website should be optimized for SERPs that includes keyword selection as well as off-page and technical SEO so your target audience is finding you as soon as they search for the type of product or service you offer.

Poor content quality : is your content and copy hard to understand? Are users missing out on a prominent product feature? Misguided, outdated content is a huge detriment to user experience, and improving your content is one of the best things you can do for your visitors.

Lack of usability across multiple devices : usability across devices becomes more important every year, and in , Understanding your users and product is one of the most important steps in building an optimized website. For any website, from ecommerce sites to software solutions and everything in between, optimization should be a part of a regular site maintenance routine.

Most importantly, an optimized website means happy users who can find your product or service and discover how it can improve their lives. Implement these website optimization techniques to start making your website work for you—and, more importantly, your users. This translates into user dissatisfaction, decreased customer loyalty, and churn, which is bad for both users and your business.

Decidicing which website optimization strategies you should prioritize depends on what area your website most needs attention. To determine this, first run tests on your website to single out its primary weak points, then use the corresponding techniques to address them.

We recommend following a website optimization roadmap to know which optimization techniques to prioritize. Hotjar Logo.

Contact Sales. Sign in. Get started free. Website optimization benefits Website optimization roadmap Website optimization questions Website optimization techniques Website optimization tests Website optimization checklist Web optimization tools.

Optimize your website with Hotjar Use Recordings, Heatmaps, Surveys, and Feedback tools to learn exactly what your users want to see—and optimize your site accordingly. Get started. Why website optimization is key to maximizing user experience Website optimization is the process of maximizing general website performance.

Home in on user intent Having a deep understanding of your users and product is absolutely crucial to website optimization. Harness the power of Hotjar Recordings and follow your user' full journey around your website. Optimizing your website is important for both the user experience as well as search engines.

Establish content authority By establishing content authority, you position your website as a leader in your industry. Hosting servers handling the normal load at peak performance may lose page speed under excessive loads.

Conducting stress tests, ramp tests, load tests and other performance tests on websites creates an accurate picture of how much web traffic the website can handle before losing performance or going down altogether. Shared hosting providers running thousands of websites on single Apache servers fail to deliver high performance even when the website is well-designed with a clean and speed-optimized code.

Performance issues intensify during peak load times when insufficient server computing power fails to process website download requests efficiently.

Monitoring server CPU load enables hosting companies and IT staff running locally hosted websites to keep a check on back-end hardware capabilities in handling unpredictable web traffic deluge. Database performance is critical for websites maintaining dynamic content pulled from back-end databases.

A mechanism should be in place to detect and alert for inaccuracies in data transmission. Keeping an eye on free disk space on servers hosting websites locally helps avoid errors and data losses that lead to broken links and eventually degrade website performance.

Website owners can leverage an array of free and premium website performance testing services to analyze web pages and generate tailored solutions to fill the deepest of performance loopholes hampering page speed. Page speed testing tools powered by search engine giant Google , website monitoring specialists Pingdom and GTMetrix yield valuable insights into website performance indicators for free, and programmatically generate scores and suggestions to educate non-geeky website owners.

Check out these in-depth guides to help you get started. These tools use a bunch of browsers to load websites and replicate end-user website experience across disparate geographic locations. Performance bottlenecks are monitored across various elements of the web page under scrutiny including file size, load time, response time and requests pertaining to various website parts JavaScript, CSS files, HTML, images, etc.

The tools generate performance scores based on a set of rules developed in the context of Web page performance and user priorities. The principles include resource caching, client-server round-trip times, data download and upload size, and a host of rules impacting end-user website experience in terms of page speed.

Suggestions are generated in anticipation of page speed improvements that should occur by implementing appropriate performance optimization rules. For example, if a large image file is served uncompressed, monitoring tools would recommend implementation of various measures to compress the bulky file.

Such issues otherwise go unnoticed due to human errors or plain ignorance, neither of which can be completely eliminated. At the same time, page speed monitoring tools would at least empower website owners to identify the issues and take appropriate steps in eradicating hidden website performance bottlenecks.

The following test was conducted using the free Pingdom website speed test tool. Visit Pingdom and conduct the test selecting various geographic locations according to the options provided, and compare the end-results. Enter your website and hit the Test Now button. It will then return a summary of your site, including a performance grade, a total load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you have on your website.

The performance insights section of the Pingdom speed test tool is very helpful. These are all based on the Google PageSpeed Insight rules. Generally, if you improve these on your site, you should see a decrease in your overall load times. The tool lists all downloaded files in a waterfall chart form, sorting it in terms of load order, load time, size, type or URL.

Analyze the performance of each file download by reading results against the key chart provided within the tool:.

The tool helps to identify the next-best actions for website speed optimization tactics. Performance ratings and test results are therefore bound to be different, and no single tool identifies every single performance bottleneck in website designs.

It is however recommended that you stick with one tool as you make improvements to better monitor your progress. However, testing across multiple tools, analyzing different website design elements and comparing multiple test results provides reasonable insights for online business owners to devise speed optimization strategies for their websites.

D eveloping a great website takes great work. Leading online businesses leverage industry-proven experience, supernatural web development skills and a killer web hosting service to develop websites boasting top-notch performance figures and user experience.

But for those who miss this starting point in their pursuit of speed-optimized websites, employing a minimalistic approach in executing simple DIY page speed optimization tactics works almost well enough to patch slow websites.

The knowledge of investing in the right set of website speed optimization solutions and services, website management and perhaps downright coding trickery is essential to yield maximum website performance.

Strategic business decisions based on this knowledge contribute directly toward enhancing website performance that in turn, lead to better online sales, leads, conversions and ultimately business success.

Optimization is the buzzword of success in the cyber world. Cyberspace, like the real physical world of planets, stars and galaxies is itself in flux — a state of continuous change and evolution.

In fact, change is the only consistent process across both the real and the cyber world. Survival in these spaces depends on how well the inhabitants can adapt to varying resources and environmental circumstances.

Online business owners and webmasters adapt their websites to maintain optimal results under the consistent impression of change by improvising and optimizing key elements of website design that make or break page speed.

As a general rule of thumb, larger files take longer to download than smaller files. Web page download time, also known as the Page Load Time depends on the total size of content assets being downloaded from hosting servers to the requesting browser.

High-quality bulky images are the largest contributors to web page size, degrading page speed and agitating visitors eagerly waiting for the web page to load. The following image optimization best-practices go a long way in reducing the negative impact of images on website speed:.

Leverage image optimization plugins such as Imagify , Optimus WordPress Image Optimizer , WP Smush , TinyPNG. And for more tips check out our in-depth image optimization guide.

Not so long ago, 30 KB was considered as the ideal web page size. And that included images, content, graphics, and code making the entire page. The popularity of CSS and JavaScript ripped apart the ceiling of 30 KB page size in delivering enriched website user experience.

Yet, modern websites coded in CSS are better at downloading content from hosting servers to requesting browsers efficiently and accurately. The following best practices ensure a speed-optimized CSS delivery:.

Tools such as Autoptimize , WP Rocket , Cache Enabler , CloudFlare CDN , and W3 Total Cache are some of the most popular tools available for minifying JavaScript and CSS.

If you are a Kinsta customer you can take advantage of the code minification feature that is built directly into the MyKinsta dashboard.

This allows customers to quickly and easily enable automatic CSS and JavaScript minification with a simple click. Reducing the number of client-server requests in delivering website content to Web browsers is an integral part of website speed optimization.

Webmasters can achieve this by not making too many folks with CSS, HTML and JavaScript requests. That is to say, optimize, minify and squish all unnecessary and compressible code lines.

Minification is particularly important for inline JavaScript and external files not cached. Google recommends minifying all JavaScript files over bytes of size, and a shaving off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference toward page load time.

A rigorous approach toward designing speed optimized website would incorporate a strong intent on eliminating unnecessary bytes from the code. Utilizing all the coding space available, deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining readability of the code reduces the overall size of website core and front-end files.

And for websites already developed without this strategy in perspective, combining multiple server requests for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into single ones effectively slashes sizeable chunks from page load times.

Monitoring page load performance changes in response to implementing each minification process individually ensure that only the unnecessary code and spaces are deleted.

Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML share common benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster browser downloading and execution, ultimately boosting page speed and yielding higher scores on website speed measuring tools. Additional website functionality with plugins comes at a price: performance degradation.

Unfortunately, webmasters deploy a myriad of plugins to add attractive but often unnecessary features such as gravatar, profile tools, website stats and font tools — some even use 10 different plugins for social media integration.

The only benefit here is successfully avoiding manual coding. Many popular websites carry as much as 80 plugins. Yet, the number is not entirely a concern if the installed plugins are developed well to avoid complex actions and expensive server processing.

If the answer to all these questions is YES , your reaction to the plugin in question should be a huge NO! A lot of WordPress experts recommend not using too many plugins. But many well-performing websites host over 80 plugins, until they install one low-quality plugin that adds half a second to page load time.

Similarly, using 10 plugins for simple and unique tasks is much better than deploying one plugin to perform all of the complex tasks by itself. Exceptions include high-quality SEO plugins by credible developers, such asYoast SEO , All In One SEO Pack free WordPress SEO plugins and the likes.

Revision management is one of the perks that WordPress has to offer. The CMS automatically keeps track of the content created on the CMS and makes all of it available for future changes. To the server, this costs unnecessary processing through additional database entries not actually required in the first place.

Controlling the number of revisions stored relieves the website core of useless burden. Check out our in-depth guide on how to optimize WordPress revisions for faster performance. This database gets crowded over time, not only with unnecessary content and post revisions, but also with garbage data.

Database optimization revolves around getting rid of garbage data and useless content from cluttered databases, shrinking them in size and making it easier for website hosting servers to fetch requested content efficiently, within minimum processing cycles.

This can also involve ensuring that you are using InnoDB for your MySQL database tables, as opposed to MyISAM. Learn how to convert myISAM to InnoDB. Especially on older and large sites, this can be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes.

Change as appropriate. Compression According to Google , every day the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed Web content.

And although most of the latest Web browsers support content compression capabilities, not every website delivers compressed contents. Visitors to these bandwidth-hogging websites experience insanely slow interactions with Web pages.

Primary reasons for this unfavorable and mostly unintentional website behavior include misconfigured hosting servers, Web proxies, old or buggy browsers and antivirus software. Uncompressed content hurts bandwidth-constrained users receiving the Web content in agonizingly lengthy page load times.

Server: On it! Browser: Ouch! Okay, client-server communication is perhaps a bit more formal and less dramatic than the above narrative. Most of the problem lies in the way client-server communication goes in the HTML world. HTML files making almost the entire Web content includes several redundant code instances.

Google recommends the following compression tactics to deliver website content efficiently:. Not following the above recommendations actually increases file size and page load times due to the overhead of compression and decompression.

Developers crave simplicity in website design code. Website code easier to create, read and maintain leads to efficient website development processes. This includes using the available code functions frequently to cut short extensive coding for specific website functionality.

However, adding too many extraneous loops and unnecessary code lines increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds. Influx a torrent of website traffic, and the milliseconds compound to plunge page speed well below acceptable standards. Webmasters can reduce these response times by delivering cached copies of the requested content instead of rendering it repeatedly in response to every single user request that pings their server.

Web cache is the mechanism of temporarily storing copies of web content to satisfy subsequent user requests from the cache database when specific conditions are met. This process reduces the number of client-server round trips taken in delivering static website content to requesting browsers.

Website owners can enable caching with the following add-ons and configurations when hosting service providers do not provide server-side caching:. Along with static cacheable content, websites also host dynamic information containing unique attributes changing regularly for every end-user.

This is the art of caching smaller elements of non-cacheable dynamic website content. These time-and-resource consuming processes are circumvented by delivering the desired output stored as a cached copy.

Fragment caching stores the output of some code blocks that remain unchanged across varied versions of the dynamic content. When the code runs and reaches the code block cached for a predetermined time, the server queries and delivers the cached output of this code instead of executing it repeatedly until the time limit reaches.

The end result is a cache-optimized website content for maximum page speed even for ecommerce and membership-based websites handling intensely dynamic content.

Kinsta actually provides four different types of caching , all of which are all automatically done at the software or server-level. So there is no need to mess with third-party plugins.

CDN is an extension of cache optimization designed to supercharge website performance aimed specifically at globally dispersed web traffic. CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copies of web pages. Internet visitors requesting this information are directed to the nearest server within this network based on their geographic location.

Traditional benefits of CDN including performance boost, high availability, and page rank collectively lift business bottom line. Check out all the reasons why you should be using a CDN.

WordPress essentially democratized the web by empowering citizens of the cyberworld to create their own blogs and launch products and services online with minimal investments. In general, website owners leverage one of the following hosting services to keep their websites up and running:.

Among these, employing managed WordPress hosting for end-to-end website development and management services is the most cost-effective and productive option for maintaining an ultra-high performance website.

Features of managed hosting services impacting page speed and website performance include:. With the release of PHP 7 came huge performance gains! So big in fact, that it should be a priority over a lot of the small optimizations you might play around with on your WordPress site.

The following benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with PHP 7 over its previous iterations. PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with the PHP 5. We also ran our own PHP benchmarks.

And similarly to the benchmarks above, we saw that PHP 7. PHP 7. The performance gap between PHP 5. PHP 8. Congratulations and thanks for reading it. We hope you found at least a couple of great bits of advice that you can act upon now!

At Kinsta, we provide the fastest WordPress hosting services and with our infrastructure you can rest assured that all the server-side optimizations are taken care of. Last, but not least, if you found our guide helpful please share it with your friends and followers! This is a great post Mark, Page speed is an important point if you want your website rank higher.

Well written Mark. All these performance tips are right on the way of a faster web app. Another room for improvement is to avoid CSS expressions. Thanks for sharing informative informative article. Lot of of stuff is here with lot of information about every subject. Long but great article Mark : You can also seed up your website by inlining the above the fold css.

Its easy to generate it using tools like the one from sitelocity. com Do you know a better one? Nice post, but i am very lazy to do it myself : I give this job speedupgency company and now my site loading speed is 2. your website is amazing and your articles that you post is very informative.

I always see your website and always get new interesting information. Thanks for it. The speed of compression must be faster than the time taken in delivering the content uncompressed. Hey Leonardo, Those GZIP ranges are what Google used to recommend.

We appreciate you checking. Thank you for the article. Do I need to specify the lowest network speed we are global site to make sure the website performs well in majority of cases?

Where can I get some examples of network speed in various geographies? Hey MJ! I have a potentially stupid question because I think I know the answer. The client wanting their images will not mind waiting for their page to load as it would be expected, but the rest of the users will need a fast loading site.

Any way around this? The only person that would really be impacted by it is the person loading it. You can see how many times this post has been shared, that tells you how much helpful this article is. Keep updating the users. Thank you!

For any internet site, the loading time is a major factor in developing now. One point I want to tell you that after I moved to Genesis or magazine framework, my blog loading speed has decreased by over 2. About the images, not so many users are well aware of Photoshop, so for the alternative to optimize graphics there are lots of websites to help you to compress image size that matter greatly on the entire size of your HTML page rendering on the user side.

Also, I switched to a dedicated server and the faster CDN Content Delivery Network that not only work for WordPress for the Blogger as well. The use of CDN and can cause a significant difference in site loading time. I used to make changes to HTML and keep an eye on site loading.

A dedicated hosting including regular tweaking can make a difference. Great Post! It worked for me and I have shared this one on my social media handles. The author has explained in clear terms how the product pages should be optimized.

I followed the steps on my site and in few weeks I was able to draw targeted traffic. These tips are easy to implement and the best part about this post is the easy explanation that the author has offered to some of the common problems that small online store owners like me face.

The website performance is an important factor. But, from my web development experience. I should make a few observations. For example Magento 2 is a monster although it is is one of best solutions for ecommerce. Also, if you use Magento 2 you need to use extensions.

Sometimes Magento developers did bad extensions. Well, it is a problem. Right now, only super slow sites are really impacted by the Google speed update but this might change at some point.

Page speed is very important, if I am checking a website and it is very slow, I would not waste my time and just transfer or look for another website.

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You may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions in the communications received. And speed sells! Highlighting the Key Aspects of Website Speed Optimization: Chapter 1 — Introduction to Website Speed Optimization Chapter 2 — Website Performance Impacts Business Success Chapter 3 — Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop Chapter 4 — Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance Chapter 5 — Website Speed Testing — Identify Performance Bottlenecks!

Chapter 6 — How to Improve Website Speed? Chapter 1: Introduction to Website Speed Optimization What Exactly is Page Speed? Page load time There are three core aspects necessary to understand page speed in the context of user experience and website performance: The view of time taken in delivering the requested material along with the accompanying HTML content to the browser.

Browser response to page load requests. The view of end-users as the requested web page renders on the browser — this is the ultimate empirical measure of page load speed. How Slow? Slow 47 percent of ecommerce customers expect page load times of less than two seconds before they consider leaving — 40 percent of users would abandon the site at the third second of waiting, before a performance analytics tool even captures their presence on the site.

And what happens when they speed up?

Combining all background images into one, using sprites can help in reducing the page load speed time. The appropriate image segment will be shown as a result of the CSS background-image and background-position properties.

Compression is an easy and useful way for website speed optimization and saving bandwidth. This is useful in improving the speed of the website. Compression of HTML and CSS files with gzip helps in saving fifty to seventy percent of the size of the file.

This website speed optimization technique helps to store website details on the computer for faster loading, the next time around. The expiration date in the header helps in determining the amount of time for which the file will remain in the computer.

The expiration time can be set as desired. Minification helps in removing the unnecessary characters from code execution, thus significantly helping in website speed optimization. This helps in removing comments, block delimiters, new line characters and whitespace characters.

These characters hinders the code execution process. Minification helps in reducing the amount of code that is transferred over the web.

Having a large number of heavy images on the webpage can really reduce its speed on the site. Using image editors to optimize the images helps in improving the load speed time of the pages. Keep alive allows the same TCP connection for HTTP conversation in place of a new one with each new request.

It is a communication between the web server and the web browser. This communication helps to grab more than one file at a time. This is another useful method for website speed optimization.

Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page. This helps in reducing queries and improving the page load speed. Search engines like google store a backup version of the page ensure that the stored page gets served up, taking lesser time.

Adding more and more plugins and themes to your site, which you are not using, can slow down the speed of the website. Remove all those plugins and themes, which are not in use anymore. Besides that, you also need to remove all the spam comments from your site dashboard and helps it load faster.

Too many popups on the page can reduce its load speed. Reducing the popups and ad banners on your web pages, is a useful way to improve the speed of the site. Many times some pages on the website become redundant but are still getting traffic. Redirects are used to transfer this traffic to more relevant pages.

Although this is an important SEO practice, too many redirects reduce are a hindrance to website speed optimization and reduce the speed of the website. Basically, when a redirect is processed, time gets wasted in moving the user from one page to another. Redirects affect mobile users a lot more than desktop users and must be used selectively on any website.

If your website is getting a high amount of traffic, the server response time will automatically go down. You need to check database queries, routing and memory and ensure that everything is in order. This will help in improving the server response time. Hence, these were some of the outstanding website speed optimization techniques for you.

Looking to develop scalable websites with faster load speed times? Choose ValueCoders for expert agile teams for all kinds of web development projects.

Build for Tomorrow. Book A Free Consultation. Blog Technology and Apps Website Speed Optimization Techniques Infographic.

Join us to get latest updates. Website Speed Optimization Techniques Infographic. Table of Contents Table of Contents Toggle Table of Content Toggle Content Delivery Network Combine Images To CSS Gzip Compression Expires Headers Minify JavaScript and CSS Optimize Images Enable HTTP Keep-Alive Headers Website speed optimization techniques for Page Caching Optimize Plugins and Themes Remove Pop Up Ads Minimize Redirects Server Response Time Optimization.

Subscribe to our blog Join us to get latest updates. Struggling with Tech Complexity? Website speed is a part of the google search algorithm User experience is one of the key goals of a website and speed optimization is one of its most important aspects Slow loading pages suffer from low user engagement have lower chances of getting ranked on search engines.

Content Delivery Network A Content Delivery Network transfers the static files to servers that are close to the users. Read more about time to first byte and time to last byte.

Redirects are performance killers. Avoid them whenever possible. A redirect will generate additional round trip times RTT and therefore quickly doubles the time that is required to load the initial HTML document before the browser even starts to load other assets. Leveraging the browser cache is crucial for assets that are rarely changing.

It is recommended to have a max-age of 7 days in such cases. There are different types of HTTP headers such as:. Learn more about different control mechanisms in our A Guide to HTTP Cache Headers article.

One of the most important HTTP cache headers is probably Cache-Control which is a header comprised of a set of directives that allow you define when and how a response should be cached and for how long. HTTP caching occurs when a browser stores copies of resources for faster access.

This can be used with your HTTPS implementation. See our full guide on how to use the Cache-Control header directives. If you are using KeyCDN you can add or modify the Expires and Cache-Control response header fields that are sent to the client.

The Expires setting is available within the KeyCDN dashboard by going to the Zone settings. This setting overwrites the value received from the origin in case of a Pull Zone. The expire value only impacts browser cache and not the KeyCDN cache. There are different forms of server side caching when it comes to website performance optimization.

This is usually done on higher traffic sites. Varnish cache is one example which can be very powerful when combined with a caching plugin, and a CDN. You can also utilize caching plugins which usually exist for each CMS platform. Domain name prefetching is a good solution to already resolve domain names before a user actually follows a link.

Here an example how to implement it in the HEAD section of your HTML:. The double slashes indicate that the URL begins with a host name this is specified in the RFC Preconnect allows the browser to set up early connections before an HTTP request is actually sent to the server.

Connections such as DNS Lookup, TCP Handshake, and TLS negotiation can be initiated beforehand, eliminating roundtrip latency for those connections and saving time for users. The example below shows what it looks like to enable preconnect for the Zone Alias link for KeyCDN.

And KeyCDN now offer's free SSL certificates with our Let's Encrypt integration. Haven't migrated to HTTPS yet? We have also have an HTTP to HTTPS migration guide. Keeping the various components of a web server up to date is critical for reasons such as security patches, performance upgrades, and so on.

If you are using PHP, upgrading to PHP7 can help greatly improve performance as compared to PHP 5. As well as taking advantage of HHVM.

Based on the results from the above image, PHP7 is able to handle requests per seconds compared to PHP 5. A lot of these test results will vary due to environments, hardware, CMS platforms tested, versions, etc.

But either way, both PHP7 and HHVM can be great ways to improve the performance of your website. The disadvantages of web fonts, such as Google Fonts, are that they add extra HTTP requests to external resources.

Web fonts are also render blocking. Below are some recommendations for better web font performance. You can see an example of each method above in our post on analyzing web font performance.

Georgia is a great system font that comes to mind that looks great and makes for easy readability. You can also move your Google Fonts to your CDN. We ran our own comparison between using Google's CDN and KeyCDN, and it was faster to use KeyCDN. Hotlink protection refers to restricting HTTP referrers in order to prevent others from embedding your assets on other websites.

Hotlink protection will save you bandwidth by prohibiting other sites from displaying your images. Example: Your site URL is www. To stop hotlinking of your images from other sites and display a replacement image called donotsteal.

jpg from an image host, place this code in your. htaccess file:. KeyCDN also has an easy way to enable hotlink protection to protect your CDN bandwidth. See our tutorial on how to create a Zone Referrer. Gzip is another form of compression which compresses web pages, CSS, and JavaScript at the server level before sending them over to the browser.

This website performance optimization is easy to implement and can make a big difference. Having a fast web host is equally as important as any website performance optimization you could make, as it is the backbone of your site.

Stay away from cheap shared hosting. We suggest going with a VPS or if you are running WordPress or Drupal, a managed host, depending upon your level of expertise and time.

They feature SSDs, 1Gbps network, a dedicated IP address, and you can easily scale up or down in a matter of seconds. Linode is also another good choice if you are looking for a cloud VPS. For those less tech savvy a managed host might be a better solution.

Yes, you will pay more, but depending on the size of your business and how important your time is, the price sometimes outweighs the cost.

Any missing file generates a HTTP error. Depending upon the platform you are running errors can be quite taxing on your server. For example, Drupal has very expensive errors.

On an 'average' site with an 'average' module load, you can be looking at MB of memory being consumed on your server to deliver a We don't recommend installing plugins or modules to check for errors, instead we advise you occasionally run your website through an external service such as the Online Broken Link Checker or a tool like Screaming Frog.

This ensures that you aren't wasting any of your server's resources on this task. You can also see these in Google Search Console. You should always upload your images at scale and not rely on CSS to size them down. If you do you will run into this little Google PageSpeed recommendation: Optimization suggestion: "By compressing and adjusting the size of you can save 5.

This recommendation refers to your images being scaled down by your browser. For example, maybe the image you upload has a px width, but the column it was placed in is only px wide.

This results in your image being scaled down to px due to CSS so that it matches the column size. It is better to always upload images at scale and also upload multiple resolutions of your images and serve the right resolution for the right device.

It is not always possible to avoid scaling with CSS, especially if you are working with high resolution retina devices. And last but not least is database optimization. Whether it is cleaning out old unused tables or creating indexes for faster access there are always things that can be optimized.

Optimizing MySQL is also very important. Unfortunately this is very specific to your environment and your setup so we can't provide recommended configurations.

Here are a few settings though to keep an eye on. A highly recommended tool is the MySQL Tuner script. It is read-only and won't make configuration changes. It will give you an overview of your server's performance and make some basic recommendations about improvements that you can make after it completes.

Here are a couple other tools you can use as well:. As you can see there are hundreds of different website performance optimization tweaks you can implement to further improve on the delivery and speed of your content. Are there some website performance optimization tips that we left out?

If so feel free to let us know below. We had a lot of great feedback from the community on our previous post, web performance experts to….

Both website speed and quality content are important for SEO. Quality content is important, as it can attract visitors to your website and encourage them to stay. However, if your website is slow, visitors may leave before they even have a chance to read your content.

To achieve faster loading times, you must focus on various aspects. Optimizing these areas enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and boosts SEO rankings.

James Gibbons is the Senior Customer Success Manager at Quattr. He has 10 years of experience in SEO and has worked with multiple agencies, brands, and B2B companies. He has helped clients scale organic and paid search presence to find hidden growth opportunities.

James writes about all aspects of SEO: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Quattr is an innovative and fast-growing venture-backed company based in Palo Alto, California USA. Quattr's AI-first platform evaluates like search engines to find opportunities across content, experience, and discoverability.

A team of growth concierge analyze your data and recommends the top improvements to make for faster organic traffic growth. Growth-driven brands trust Quattr and are seeing sustained traffic growth. Test drives are a live demo with an analysis of some of your top pages.

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Keyword Research Tools Free Keyword Research Tool. View All Tools. It's a critical factor for success in today's online world. Table of Contents.

What is Website Speed Optimization? Importance of Faster Loading Website ii. How to Measure Website Speed. Website Speed Optimization Tools. Targeted approach, focusing on optimizing loading speed for specific pages.

Area of Focus Focuses on improving server response time, reducing HTTP requests, leveraging browser caching, and using content distribution networks CDNs , etc. Focuses on optimization techniques such as minimizing HTTP requests for different page parts, like scripts, images, and CSS, optimizing images, and enabling compression.

Goals Consistent user experience across the website, reducing bounce rates and enhancing conversions on a broad scale. Swift loading for key landing pages, ensuring seamless access to critical content for better engagement.

Benefits Improves user experience, user engagement, conversions, and search engine ranking. Complexity Relatively complex due to the wide-ranging factors addressed and the coordination required across the entire website.

Comparatively streamlined, concentrating efforts on smaller elements and optimizations for individual pages. Strategy Involves continuous monitoring, adjustments, and adaptation to changes in technology, user behavior, and evolving content. Often geared towards specific campaigns, promotions, or targeted content, focusing on immediate goals and optimizing for short-term objectives.

Optimize Website Loading Speed with Advanced Insights Using Quattr! Test Drive Quattr. Website Speed Optimization FAQs. How often should you conduct a website speed test? Does improving page speed lead to faster website loading? Which is more important for SEO: website speed or quality content? How do I optimize my website speed?

About The Author. James Gibbons. Test Drive Quattr Test drives are a live demo with an analysis of some of your top pages. Your request has been received. We will be in touch via email to schedule a time to walk you through the test drive, or you can book a convenient time by clicking the button below.

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AI Content Writing Tools Content Brief Generator. AI SEO Tools H1 Heading Generator. AI Keyword Research Tools Free Keyword Research Tool. Ready to see how Quattr can help your brand? As a result, the popular physics phenomenon of non-linearity kicks in, and each component performs unpredictably, usually consuming more processing cycles than expected.

From the perspective of end users, excessive services are often unnecessary or at most, considered secondary to the actual content portrayed by the website. Many websites host more than 80 assets images, plugins, add-ons and other multimedia content , and all of this content is not necessarily delivered to requesting browsers as per user preferences.

Additional investments in developing media-rich websites ultimately backfire when the information actually requested to reach end-users is held by irrelevant sign-up forms, analytics code and other content adding unnecessary weight to the website.

Global smartphone subscription is expected to surpass the 2. The competition to capture the attention of mobile users is even more intense due to slow loading mobile websites and lower visitor patience levels. And on average, 3 in 4 people will abandon a mobile website if it takes any longer than 5 seconds to load, whereas an average mobile takes even longer periods of seconds to load.

Excessive delays in mobile page load time occur mostly when websites are not specifically optimized and designed to deliver high performance on a mobile device interface.

Even with dedicated smartphone-optimized pages, mobile users are not always redirected to the intended mobile-versions of desktop website pages requested from mobile browsers.

Redirects are instructions that send users seeking one website URL to another one that supposedly contains the exact information requested by users. Redirects are most effective for mobile users searching for desktop versions of website pages that must be mapped well to equivalent mobile versions in delivering the best mobile website experience.

Doing so inaccurately keeps users from switching between unwanted website files until they reach the right one. This causes unnecessary delays in loading the information actually sought by end-users.

Website owners are eventually responsible for losing competitive advantages in the mobile space when the mobile web traffic is simply redirected toward irrelevant desktop website version, instead of delivering a speed-optimized mobile solution for mobile visitors.

Websites not speed-optimized for mobile devices suffer from common issues hampering mobile user experience. Issues such as faulty redirects, unplayable videos, bloated images and graphics, irrelevant cross-linking and unnecessary assets delivered to mobile visitors degrade website performance and ultimately drive bounce rates.

Only 10 percent of the waiting period is defined by the HTML response to browser requests, and the remaining 90 percent of the delay is caused in rendering pages, parsing HTML, executing code scripts and retrieving embedded assets.

Website performance overhaul with optimization tools and script tweaks can scrape off sizeable chunks from page load times, but perhaps not as effectively as developing a speed optimized website from scratch. And the latter is more of a marketing strategy, a business decision and slight awareness in avoiding the most common mistakes that can potentially ruin online businesses by killing website performance.

W eb traffic and search engine ranking is primarily a vanity metric for website performance. Important as they are, neither is more indicative of online business success than sales figures and conversion rates. Putting things into perspective, ecommerce websites with almost zero percent bounce rate, 15 percent conversion rates and 10, unique website visitors from low search engine rankings fare far better than high ranking sites enjoying , unique visits with only 0.

The debate of conversion rate optimization can carry on for encyclopedic lengths, and implementing business best-practices on Frankensteinish websites can take tons of investments with efforts of patient execution spanning across months before any significant conversion rate improvement is yielded.

Online businesses focusing on improving website performance experience immediate results in the form of higher conversion rates and sky-rocketing sales. Page speed, in particular, fills the void in enhancing marketability by improving website user experience to keep impatient online customers engaged and satisfied.

The staggering statistics are as follows:. These statistics only describe how page speed impacts business success in the competitive cyberspace. The pursuit for speed optimized website begins with identifying critical front-end issues most apparent under standard website performance testing processes.

Before the exploration for page speed bumps begins, understanding the behavior of the most impactful website speed performance indicators helps to accurately identify performance loopholes in websites. Downloading tons of memory hogging website content within milliseconds of initiating browser requests is not entirely possible without a thorough revamp and speed optimization of slow websites.

In many cases, visitors only seek the primary information in the form of content or product information portrayed by Web pages.

Add a lot of complementary graphics and website features, and page rendering times rise beyond measure. Keeping the initial page speed high keeps visitors engaged even when the entire website content including bulky graphics take ages to render completely.

Monitoring high initial page speed by tracking parameters such as Time to First Byte TTFB or performing ping requests from website servers accurately describe initial page load times and page speed statistics.

If these take too long, work needs to be done at the back-end in the form of server-side and website core optimization. Monitoring the time consumed in rendering entire page content onto requesting browsers is an integral element of end-user website experience testing.

This information drives strategic IT decisions in deploying and optimizing hardware infrastructure to maximize website performance. Regularly monitoring this performance indicator enables website owners to realize how the website performs as it scales in terms of size and content type.

With this information, webmasters can cache static content in separate locations such as Content Delivery Network CDN while maintaining dedicated back-end servers to efficiently deliver dynamically-loaded content.

One of the perks of operating an online business is the ever-expanding global market reach. But this reach is not always equally efficient — and hence effective — across the globe due to the very factors that limit client-server communication.

Government policies, bandwidth and technology limitations prevent optimum website performance around the world, so website speed and availability tests should be conducted across disparate locations to determine global website performance results impacting world-wide business reach.

Website performance varies with fluctuations in web traffic. Hosting servers handling the normal load at peak performance may lose page speed under excessive loads.

Conducting stress tests, ramp tests, load tests and other performance tests on websites creates an accurate picture of how much web traffic the website can handle before losing performance or going down altogether.

Shared hosting providers running thousands of websites on single Apache servers fail to deliver high performance even when the website is well-designed with a clean and speed-optimized code. Performance issues intensify during peak load times when insufficient server computing power fails to process website download requests efficiently.

Monitoring server CPU load enables hosting companies and IT staff running locally hosted websites to keep a check on back-end hardware capabilities in handling unpredictable web traffic deluge. Database performance is critical for websites maintaining dynamic content pulled from back-end databases.

A mechanism should be in place to detect and alert for inaccuracies in data transmission. Keeping an eye on free disk space on servers hosting websites locally helps avoid errors and data losses that lead to broken links and eventually degrade website performance.

Website owners can leverage an array of free and premium website performance testing services to analyze web pages and generate tailored solutions to fill the deepest of performance loopholes hampering page speed.

Page speed testing tools powered by search engine giant Google , website monitoring specialists Pingdom and GTMetrix yield valuable insights into website performance indicators for free, and programmatically generate scores and suggestions to educate non-geeky website owners. Check out these in-depth guides to help you get started.

These tools use a bunch of browsers to load websites and replicate end-user website experience across disparate geographic locations. Performance bottlenecks are monitored across various elements of the web page under scrutiny including file size, load time, response time and requests pertaining to various website parts JavaScript, CSS files, HTML, images, etc.

The tools generate performance scores based on a set of rules developed in the context of Web page performance and user priorities. The principles include resource caching, client-server round-trip times, data download and upload size, and a host of rules impacting end-user website experience in terms of page speed.

Suggestions are generated in anticipation of page speed improvements that should occur by implementing appropriate performance optimization rules. For example, if a large image file is served uncompressed, monitoring tools would recommend implementation of various measures to compress the bulky file.

Such issues otherwise go unnoticed due to human errors or plain ignorance, neither of which can be completely eliminated. At the same time, page speed monitoring tools would at least empower website owners to identify the issues and take appropriate steps in eradicating hidden website performance bottlenecks.

The following test was conducted using the free Pingdom website speed test tool. Visit Pingdom and conduct the test selecting various geographic locations according to the options provided, and compare the end-results.

Enter your website and hit the Test Now button. It will then return a summary of your site, including a performance grade, a total load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you have on your website.

The performance insights section of the Pingdom speed test tool is very helpful. These are all based on the Google PageSpeed Insight rules. Generally, if you improve these on your site, you should see a decrease in your overall load times.

The tool lists all downloaded files in a waterfall chart form, sorting it in terms of load order, load time, size, type or URL. Analyze the performance of each file download by reading results against the key chart provided within the tool:.

The tool helps to identify the next-best actions for website speed optimization tactics. Performance ratings and test results are therefore bound to be different, and no single tool identifies every single performance bottleneck in website designs.

It is however recommended that you stick with one tool as you make improvements to better monitor your progress. However, testing across multiple tools, analyzing different website design elements and comparing multiple test results provides reasonable insights for online business owners to devise speed optimization strategies for their websites.

D eveloping a great website takes great work. Leading online businesses leverage industry-proven experience, supernatural web development skills and a killer web hosting service to develop websites boasting top-notch performance figures and user experience.

But for those who miss this starting point in their pursuit of speed-optimized websites, employing a minimalistic approach in executing simple DIY page speed optimization tactics works almost well enough to patch slow websites.

The knowledge of investing in the right set of website speed optimization solutions and services, website management and perhaps downright coding trickery is essential to yield maximum website performance.

Strategic business decisions based on this knowledge contribute directly toward enhancing website performance that in turn, lead to better online sales, leads, conversions and ultimately business success.

Optimization is the buzzword of success in the cyber world. Cyberspace, like the real physical world of planets, stars and galaxies is itself in flux — a state of continuous change and evolution. In fact, change is the only consistent process across both the real and the cyber world.

Survival in these spaces depends on how well the inhabitants can adapt to varying resources and environmental circumstances. Online business owners and webmasters adapt their websites to maintain optimal results under the consistent impression of change by improvising and optimizing key elements of website design that make or break page speed.

As a general rule of thumb, larger files take longer to download than smaller files. Web page download time, also known as the Page Load Time depends on the total size of content assets being downloaded from hosting servers to the requesting browser.

High-quality bulky images are the largest contributors to web page size, degrading page speed and agitating visitors eagerly waiting for the web page to load.

The following image optimization best-practices go a long way in reducing the negative impact of images on website speed:. Leverage image optimization plugins such as Imagify , Optimus WordPress Image Optimizer , WP Smush , TinyPNG.

And for more tips check out our in-depth image optimization guide. Not so long ago, 30 KB was considered as the ideal web page size. And that included images, content, graphics, and code making the entire page. The popularity of CSS and JavaScript ripped apart the ceiling of 30 KB page size in delivering enriched website user experience.

Yet, modern websites coded in CSS are better at downloading content from hosting servers to requesting browsers efficiently and accurately.

The following best practices ensure a speed-optimized CSS delivery:. Tools such as Autoptimize , WP Rocket , Cache Enabler , CloudFlare CDN , and W3 Total Cache are some of the most popular tools available for minifying JavaScript and CSS. If you are a Kinsta customer you can take advantage of the code minification feature that is built directly into the MyKinsta dashboard.

This allows customers to quickly and easily enable automatic CSS and JavaScript minification with a simple click. Reducing the number of client-server requests in delivering website content to Web browsers is an integral part of website speed optimization.

Webmasters can achieve this by not making too many folks with CSS, HTML and JavaScript requests. That is to say, optimize, minify and squish all unnecessary and compressible code lines. Minification is particularly important for inline JavaScript and external files not cached. Google recommends minifying all JavaScript files over bytes of size, and a shaving off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference toward page load time.

A rigorous approach toward designing speed optimized website would incorporate a strong intent on eliminating unnecessary bytes from the code. Utilizing all the coding space available, deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining readability of the code reduces the overall size of website core and front-end files.

And for websites already developed without this strategy in perspective, combining multiple server requests for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into single ones effectively slashes sizeable chunks from page load times. Monitoring page load performance changes in response to implementing each minification process individually ensure that only the unnecessary code and spaces are deleted.

Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML share common benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster browser downloading and execution, ultimately boosting page speed and yielding higher scores on website speed measuring tools. Additional website functionality with plugins comes at a price: performance degradation.

Unfortunately, webmasters deploy a myriad of plugins to add attractive but often unnecessary features such as gravatar, profile tools, website stats and font tools — some even use 10 different plugins for social media integration.

The only benefit here is successfully avoiding manual coding. Many popular websites carry as much as 80 plugins. Yet, the number is not entirely a concern if the installed plugins are developed well to avoid complex actions and expensive server processing. If the answer to all these questions is YES , your reaction to the plugin in question should be a huge NO!

A lot of WordPress experts recommend not using too many plugins. But many well-performing websites host over 80 plugins, until they install one low-quality plugin that adds half a second to page load time. Similarly, using 10 plugins for simple and unique tasks is much better than deploying one plugin to perform all of the complex tasks by itself.

Exceptions include high-quality SEO plugins by credible developers, such asYoast SEO , All In One SEO Pack free WordPress SEO plugins and the likes. Revision management is one of the perks that WordPress has to offer.

The CMS automatically keeps track of the content created on the CMS and makes all of it available for future changes. To the server, this costs unnecessary processing through additional database entries not actually required in the first place.

Controlling the number of revisions stored relieves the website core of useless burden. Check out our in-depth guide on how to optimize WordPress revisions for faster performance.

This database gets crowded over time, not only with unnecessary content and post revisions, but also with garbage data. Database optimization revolves around getting rid of garbage data and useless content from cluttered databases, shrinking them in size and making it easier for website hosting servers to fetch requested content efficiently, within minimum processing cycles.

This can also involve ensuring that you are using InnoDB for your MySQL database tables, as opposed to MyISAM. Learn how to convert myISAM to InnoDB.

Especially on older and large sites, this can be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes. Change as appropriate. Compression According to Google , every day the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed Web content.

And although most of the latest Web browsers support content compression capabilities, not every website delivers compressed contents. Visitors to these bandwidth-hogging websites experience insanely slow interactions with Web pages. Primary reasons for this unfavorable and mostly unintentional website behavior include misconfigured hosting servers, Web proxies, old or buggy browsers and antivirus software.

Uncompressed content hurts bandwidth-constrained users receiving the Web content in agonizingly lengthy page load times. Server: On it! Browser: Ouch! Okay, client-server communication is perhaps a bit more formal and less dramatic than the above narrative.

Most of the problem lies in the way client-server communication goes in the HTML world. HTML files making almost the entire Web content includes several redundant code instances. Google recommends the following compression tactics to deliver website content efficiently:. Not following the above recommendations actually increases file size and page load times due to the overhead of compression and decompression.

Developers crave simplicity in website design code. Website code easier to create, read and maintain leads to efficient website development processes.

This includes using the available code functions frequently to cut short extensive coding for specific website functionality. However, adding too many extraneous loops and unnecessary code lines increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds.

Influx a torrent of website traffic, and the milliseconds compound to plunge page speed well below acceptable standards. Webmasters can reduce these response times by delivering cached copies of the requested content instead of rendering it repeatedly in response to every single user request that pings their server.

Web cache is the mechanism of temporarily storing copies of web content to satisfy subsequent user requests from the cache database when specific conditions are met. This process reduces the number of client-server round trips taken in delivering static website content to requesting browsers.

Website owners can enable caching with the following add-ons and configurations when hosting service providers do not provide server-side caching:. Along with static cacheable content, websites also host dynamic information containing unique attributes changing regularly for every end-user.

This is the art of caching smaller elements of non-cacheable dynamic website content. These time-and-resource consuming processes are circumvented by delivering the desired output stored as a cached copy. Fragment caching stores the output of some code blocks that remain unchanged across varied versions of the dynamic content.

When the code runs and reaches the code block cached for a predetermined time, the server queries and delivers the cached output of this code instead of executing it repeatedly until the time limit reaches. The end result is a cache-optimized website content for maximum page speed even for ecommerce and membership-based websites handling intensely dynamic content.

Kinsta actually provides four different types of caching , all of which are all automatically done at the software or server-level. So there is no need to mess with third-party plugins.

CDN is an extension of cache optimization designed to supercharge website performance aimed specifically at globally dispersed web traffic. CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copies of web pages. Internet visitors requesting this information are directed to the nearest server within this network based on their geographic location.

Traditional benefits of CDN including performance boost, high availability, and page rank collectively lift business bottom line. Check out all the reasons why you should be using a CDN. WordPress essentially democratized the web by empowering citizens of the cyberworld to create their own blogs and launch products and services online with minimal investments.

In general, website owners leverage one of the following hosting services to keep their websites up and running:.

Among these, employing managed WordPress hosting for end-to-end website development and management services is the most cost-effective and productive option for maintaining an ultra-high performance website. Features of managed hosting services impacting page speed and website performance include:.

With the release of PHP 7 came huge performance gains! So big in fact, that it should be a priority over a lot of the small optimizations you might play around with on your WordPress site. The following benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with PHP 7 over its previous iterations.

PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with the PHP 5. We also ran our own PHP benchmarks. And similarly to the benchmarks above, we saw that PHP 7.

PHP 7. The performance gap between PHP 5. PHP 8. Congratulations and thanks for reading it. We hope you found at least a couple of great bits of advice that you can act upon now!

At Kinsta, we provide the fastest WordPress hosting services and with our infrastructure you can rest assured that all the server-side optimizations are taken care of. Last, but not least, if you found our guide helpful please share it with your friends and followers! This is a great post Mark, Page speed is an important point if you want your website rank higher.

Well written Mark. All these performance tips are right on the way of a faster web app. Another room for improvement is to avoid CSS expressions. Thanks for sharing informative informative article. Lot of of stuff is here with lot of information about every subject.

Long but great article Mark : You can also seed up your website by inlining the above the fold css. Its easy to generate it using tools like the one from sitelocity. com Do you know a better one? Nice post, but i am very lazy to do it myself : I give this job speedupgency company and now my site loading speed is 2.

your website is amazing and your articles that you post is very informative. I always see your website and always get new interesting information. Thanks for it. The speed of compression must be faster than the time taken in delivering the content uncompressed.

Hey Leonardo, Those GZIP ranges are what Google used to recommend. We appreciate you checking. Thank you for the article. Do I need to specify the lowest network speed we are global site to make sure the website performs well in majority of cases?

There are a lot of different ways to make your website work faster and we created the list of the most effective ones. Use a Content Delivery Network CDN A content delivery network is a set of web servers distributed across various geographical locations that provide web content to end users with regard to their location.

When you host the website on a single server, all users requests are sent to the same hardware. For this reason, the time needed to process each request increases. On top of that, the load time increases when users are physically far from the server.

With CDN, user requests are redirected to the nearest server. As a result, the content is delivered to a user quicker and a website works faster. This is a rather expensive, but quite effective way to optimize the load time.

Move your website to a better host There are three possible types of hosting: Shared hosting Virtual Private Servers VPS hosting Dedicated server The most popular type of hosting that is used all over the world is sharing hosting.

With shared hosting, you share CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites that also use this server. Virtual Private Servers and dedicated servers are much faster. VPS uses multiple servers for content distribution. If your website has the average traffic or you have the eCommerce site with traffic spikes in some periods, VPS will be the optimal solution for you.

The most expensive hosting option is to use a dedicated server which can be your own physical server. In this case, you pay a server rent and hire a system administrator to maintain it.

Another approach is to rent dedicated cloud resource from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or other public cloud provider. Both approaches can also be combined into a hybrid cloud that we discussed recently. With dedicated servers, all resources belong only to you and you get the full control of it.

Cloud infrastructures can also add unlimited and on-demand scalability under a number of packages. Serverless architecture is yet another option that removes maintenance and server set up procedures altogether. Consider reading our separate article covering serverless architecture specifics and benefits.

Optimize the size of images on your website Everyone loves eye-catching images. In the case of successful eCommerce sites, images are the vital part. A lot of photos, images, graphics on your product pages improve engagement. The negative side of the image use is that they are usually large files that slow down a website.

The best way to reduce the image size without compromising its quality is to compress images using such tools as ImageOptim , JPEGmini , or Kraken.

The procedure may take a bit of time but it's worth it. Reduce the number of plugins Plugins are common components of each website.

They add specific features suggested by third parties. Unfortunately, the more plugins are installed, the more resources are needed to run them. As a result, the website works slower and also security issues can appear.

As time passes, the number of plugins grows, while some of them may not be used anymore. We recommend checking out all the plugins you have installed and deleting unnecessary ones. First, run the performance tests on your page to find out which plugins are slowing down your website.

Not only does the website speed depend on the number of installed plugins but also on their quality. Try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries.

The best solution is to keep only the necessary ones and ensure that they are kept up to date. Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files If your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it leads to a large number of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access particular files.

If you reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files this will undoubtedly speed up your website. Try to group all JavaScript into one and also do so with all CSS files. This will reduce the overall number of HTTP requests.

There are a lot of tools to minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly. For instance, you can use WillPeavy , Script Minifier , or Grunt tools. Use website caching In case there are a lot of users accessing the page at one time servers work slowly and need more time to deliver the web page to each user.

Caching is the process of storing the current version of your website on the hosting and presenting this version until your website is updated. The approaches to website caching depend on the platform your website is developed on.

For WordPress for instance, you can use the following plugins: W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache. If you use VPS or a dedicated server, you can also set up caching under your general settings.