Site Speed : A Necessity In 2021

Site speed has been a hot topic for a couple of years now, yet many businesses still find themselves intimidated by the entire dilemma.

How does one build a feature-rich, attractive website which will also load fast?

And why bother anyway?

Here’s a transparent, non-technical guide to increasing your site speed:

Why Is Site Speed So Important?

Site speed has always been a crucial website metric potentially hindering the performance but we started taking it really seriously only Google announced it as a ranking factor.

From that time on, a page load time wasn't only the question of usability but also a sign helping or hindering your organic search visibility.

Later on, Google reinforced the message by making site speed a crucial signal for ads and mobile rankings.

Making your site faster now means generating more traffic from search engines. Any SEO audit—whether for a long time or a replacement site—must include page load time.

But the matter is, of course, bigger than program positions.

Site speed was proved to possess an immediate impact on how long a user keeps using your site. Google has found that the slower the page, the upper the bounce rate:

Additionally, it's been found that if it takes quite 4 seconds for an internet page to load, it'll lose 1 / 4 of potential viewers.

As the mobile Internet adoption grows (and with it, the power to access any website while on the go), so do the consumers’ expectations for faster pages and smoother web experiences. As stated by Mobile Marketing Association in Germany, consumers expect sites to require no quite a second to completely load.

On the opposite hand, a 2-second page speed decrease was found to extend conversions by 66%. In a different report, decreasing page load time from 8 to 2 seconds increases conversion rates by a huge 74%.

How to Diagnose If you've got a Problem?

The newly updated PageSpeed Insights by Google is your first tool to ascertain if there's any problem to unravel. Now, from my experience with multiple sites, don’t get too stressed if you score below 70.

[Google’s own property scoring 28 of 100 for Google’s mobile speed load test]

No site I checked ever scored quite 80. Google’s bar is about very high lately, so it's next to impossible to attain above 90, especially if you’ve never done any speed optimization before. simply because you bought 60-70 on the test, there’s not necessarily any usability issue to unravel urgently.

It is something to continuously work on overtime. And I’ll list some tools and tricks below, so keep scrolling.

It is also important to watch site speed closely to make sure there’s nothing prompting your website traffic to go away.

How to Speed Up Your Site?

So if you're a blogger or a little business owner who doesn’t have a budget to rent a developer or if you merely cannot find one you'll trust, how does one make your site faster?

There are a couple of possible solutions, and that they will depend upon your current content management system you're using. I’ll highlight a couple of easiest-to-implement options that you'll play with reception.

Look at Your Current Options

Most up-to-date site builders and content management platforms have already got some speed optimization feature built-in. All you would like is to try and do some digging and possibly reach bent customer support for help.

· A world-class CDN (content management network) at no extra cost. Simply put, a CDN makes your site equally fast in any part of the planet

· Built-in image size parameters ensuring you employ optimized images while keeping the standard.

· Automatic code minification to optimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

· Premium support for his or her “Plus” users

If your current solution isn't taking it seriously, it's an honest sign you would like to maneuver your site elsewhere.

Use WordPress Plugins

WordPress site owners may use a spread of plugins allowing you to hurry up your blog. In fact, the variability of options is often overwhelming, so I’ll briefly review the answer I'm using myself.

Autoptimize is that the free WordPress plugin I'm using without having to show it to technical support. thereupon said, I did have a little issue with it optimizing my images, so here’s the screenshot of my very own settings that do the work on behalf of me without causing any problems:

In the first tab, I kept all default options intact, keeping the subsequent boxes unchecked:

Load JavaScript early

Inline “above the fold CSS” while loading the most “autoptimized” CSS only after page load

Everything else is checked there. Without doing anything, here’s my PageSpeed test result.

Desktop:

Mobile:

Conclusion and Takeaways

· Page load speed features a direct impact on your site on-page engagement and conversions. It's also one among Google’s ranking signals affecting your site rankings in both mobile and desktop search also as in paid ads.

· To check your site speed, run Google’s PageSpeed Insights. For continuous monitoring, use an on-site analytics platform like Finteza.

· To improve your site speed, start by checking together with your website builder’s knowledge domain and get in touch with their support. Most serious content management systems include page speed functionality for free of charge.

· For WordPress-run websites, there’s a spread of plugins but you would like to see one. I even have good results with Autoptimize but you can pick another one.

Improving your page load time will most certainly be appreciated by your site visitors, so it’s definitely well worth the effort. Good luck!

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