Page speed is important for your website’s performance.

To improve it, you need to understand:

  • How it works
  • What influences it

Because when your web pages load quickly, it helps to:

  • Reduce bounce rates
  • Increase user experience (UX)
  • Boosts search engine rankings

So, in this article we will learn:

  • What is page speed is
  • Why page speed is important
  • How to measure page speed 

Then we will go through quick solutions to improve your website’s page loading speed.

Let’s dive right in.

What is page speed?

Page speed is how fast a web page loads on your website.

This doesn’t mean website speed but the loading time of a specific page.

Your website’s or it’s web page’s speed could be influenced by:

  • The number of images, videos and media files
  • Installed themes and plugins
  • Coding and server-side scripts

These affect your web page’s loading speed and your website’s UX.

Because, visitors don’t like slow-loading pages and will click on other search results.

Is page speed important?

Page loading speed is important for visitors.

It can be the difference between website visitors staying or clicking elsewhere.

According to Google load times of:

  • Up to three seconds increases bounce rates by 32 percent
  • Up to five seconds increases bounce rates by 90 percent

So, if your web pages don’t load in a few seconds:

  • Visitors will leave your website
  • Decreases chances of engagement
  • Decreases chances of conversions

Page speed also matters because:

  • It’s important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
  • A Google ranking signal for desktop and mobile searches
  • Influences your brand image

Because slow web pages make your brand and website look unprofessional and unreliable.

So, make sure to improve page speed for your website.

Testing Page Speed

Before we get into improving your website’s speed, check your web pages performance. 

You can use different beginner-friendly tools to test page speed, such as:

But let’s talk about Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

The benefits of using this tool includes:

  • It’s easy-to-use
  • Testing web page speed on desktop
  • Testing web page speed on mobile devices

And it’s by Google, so it tests requirements for ranking high on search results.

Using PageSpeed Insights is simple, start by:

  • Entering the web page’s URL in the text field
  • Click the “Analyse” button
  • Wait for PageSpeed Insights to analyse the page’s content
  • Then it will give a score from 0 to 100
  • Under the score, the tool lists suggestions to improve page loading speed

Note: It displays separate scores and suggestions for desktop and mobile versions of your website.

This tool is a good starting point, giving information on:

  • How fast your web pages load
  • Ways to improve these web page’s loading speeds

Improve Page Loading Speed

Now let’s learn how to make your web pages load faster.

Pick a good hosting provider

Your hosting provider can make or break your website’s:

  • Management
  • Performance
  • Page speed

A cheap hosting provider can mean poor performance.

Because they share resources with multiple websites.

This overloads the server and slows down your page’s loading times.

But the benefits of a better hosting provider includes:

  • Better performance
  • More powerful
  • Designed for speed

These providers don’t share hosting, meaning:

  • Other websites won’t drain your resources
  • Faster page loading speeds

Compress Images

Images do help improve your web page’s appearance and your content’s quality.

But, large images slow down loading times.

To increase page loading speeds, you need to compress your images.

You can do this by:

  • Changing file formats
  • Turning on lazy loading
  • Compressing images with lossy or lossless compression

Reducing images’ file sizes helps your web pages load faster.

For this, you can use WordPress plugins like WP Smush:

  • Just install the plugin
  • Then activate it

This plugin automatically resizes and compresses images affecting the quality.

It also includes features for:

  • Lossless compression
  • Lazy loading
  • Bulk image optimisation

Other options for reducing your images sizes are:

Cut down redirects

A website with too many redirects has long loading times.

Because loading takes longer when a page has to redirect visitors somewhere else.

Sometimes redirects are necessary, like when moving to a new domain.

But, redirects that aren’t needed slow down page loading times.

A few ways cut down redirects in WordPress, include:

  • Avoid creating redirects when making internal links and menus
  • Your Top-Level Domain (TLD) should have one redirect max

To find incorrect redirects on your website, use:

The Redirect mapper tool finds duplicate redirects and Screaming Frog finds all redirects on your website and where they go to.

After using these tools to find unnecessary redirects, you can delete them via your website’s .htaccess file.

Cache web pages

Caching is effective at making your web pages faster.

Caching helps servers load web pages on visitors’ browsers faster by storing copies of your website’s files.

Caching helps servers use less resources to load a web page.

Different ways to cache your web pages, include:

  • Letting your hosting provider do it
  • Use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache

This WordPress plugin is free and easily caches your web pages fast.

Get started by:

  • Installing this plugin
  • Then activate it
  • Go to General Settings
  • Click on Page Cache
  • Select the Enable option

Turn on browser caching

Browser caching also improves page loading speeds.

With browser caching, the web page doesn’t have to reload each time a user visits.

And works by allowing the browser to store information, like:

  • Stylesheets
  • Images
  • JavaScript files

A WordPress caching plugin you can use is WP Rocket, similar to W3 Total Cache mentioned above.

This plugin uses page caching and cache preloading to help:

  • Optimise your web page’s speed
  • Giving you faster loading times

Load CSS and JavaScript files at once

Your website has CSS and JavaScript files and they load either:

  • One at a time
  • All at the same time

Loading files one after the other, in order of appearance on your web page, is called synchronous.

The browser finishes loading the first file of the script then loads the next.

Loading multiple files at once, making web page’s load faster, is called asynchronous.

You can do this in WordPress by combining:

  • The Autoptimize plugin
  • The Async JavaScript plugin

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

You can boost page loading speed by:

  • Optimising file loading
  • Minifying CSS, JavaScript and HTML codes

To do this means reducing file sizes by removing:

  • Unnecessary spaces
  • Characters
  • Comments
  • Other unneeded elements

The benefits of doing this are:

  • Easier file combinations
  • Cleaner code
  • Leaner web pages
  • Faster load speed

Instead of going through every line of your website’s code files, minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML with the Autoptimize plugin.

This plugin is:

  • Free
  • Easily to use
  • Automatically aggregates and minify scripts and styles

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

Help web page’s load faster using a network of servers called Content Delivery Networks (CDN), also known as ‘content distribution networks’.

They work with hosting providers to store copies of your website’s content on servers globally.

Even being used to send copies of your website’s files to data centres in strategic locations.

This helps cut the distance data requests have to go from browsers to host servers.

And instead CDNs load web page content from servers closest to each visitor.

Delete plugins you don’t need

Too many plugins can slow your website down.

Also watch out for plugins that are:

  • Out of date
  • Aren’t well maintained

Because these plugins can affect performance by:

  • Being security threats
  • Having compatibility issues

So, reduce the number of plugins on your WordPress site.

Simply, disable and delete plugins you don’t use.

Or review the plugins and see if they’re needed.

Some plugins can even slow your website down.

To find these plugins, test them individually:

  • Deactivate all plugins
  • Then turn them on one by one
  • When you activate a plugin, test the speed with PageSpeed Insights
  • Now check if your score and timing has changed

Some plugins can increase your page speed.

But, if you see a plugin that affects your page speed a lot then find an alternative that’s better optimised.

Conclusion

Reducing page loading speed improves:

  • Overall website performance
  • UX
  • SEO

So, use the methods mentioned above to decrease your loading times.

And remember, the longer your web pages take to load, the higher chance of visitors leaving.

Now tell me how these tips have helped your website?

Or if you have additional tips not mentioned above.

Let me know in the comment section below.

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