The question of the day is; How to optimize your website for greater speed? Well, as you’ll see in this post, it’s easy!

Website speed is a critical factor for all! It dramatically affects user experience, performance, and website growth.

There are so many factors that contribute to slow speeds on a website. However, this post will be a guide on these and more.

Why optimize your website for greater speed?

An average user wait time is around 3–5 seconds. People won’t use your site if it takes longer to load. That’s bad for you as it makes you lose clients.

A good website has good metrics, is fast, and has the best user experience. Of course, users play a massive part in the site’s growth and performance. 

When users are happy, positive results are seen. A slow site will cost your brand! 

From good speeds, conversion rates are high, bounce rates are low, and overall user experience is improved.

Get your site to rank better, retain clients and grow your sales.

What affects speed

Website speed refers to how fast users can see and interact with your content. Users should only take sites that take a short time.

These things affect speed:

• Large images that are not cached add extra time and make loading time more!
• Poor hosting plans- you need proper server utilities to keep your website performing great.
• Too many plugins and widgets- when you have unused ones, they take up space, which takes time to load.
• Heavy use of Java scripts and CSS affects the load time of websites.

There are things to consider, like network conditions, hosting location, and server response time. 

Website success is dependent on speed. Google and other search engines reward websites on rate and good user experience metrics.

Five tools to use to measure website speed

a. Google Page Insights

It’s a platform provided by Google for free! It reports mobile and desktop performances and offers recommendations for improvements.

Check what it looks like; it’s simple, easy to use, and provides the best insights! A simple test on truehost gave us the following:

Google Page Insights has further outlined where to improve. It has made it easy for anyone to check their site and adjust for better results.

With this platform, everyone can optimize their site instantly. Try using Google Page Insights today and make your website better right away!

b. GTmetrix

Carbon60, a company in Canada offering many cloud services, made a tool that helps people check how well their website works.

This platform has tons of features for performance tests. It also allows one to export data that one can share.

They have a free and a premium plan. The free plan yields favorable outcomes, and attempting it for a specific site is recommended.

On testing our site, the following are visible;

Their recommendations are eliminating render-blocking resources, avoiding chaining critical requests, and using HTTP/2 for all resources.

With all these, we can transform our site metrics to Grade A. Use GTmetrix to optimize your website for greater speed.

c. KeyCDN Website Speed Test

A platform based in Switzerland provides content delivery solutions for everyone. This tool can evaluate performance and optimize the site for greater speed.

Running a test on truehost.co.ke, we got these;

They have good recommendations that are easy to fix. This platform provides more informative information that is easy to understand.

Using it will help your site transform. Try the free plan and make changes to your website for greater yields.

d. Pingdom

It’s a popular website analyzer tool. Pingdom has two website monitoring modes, the synthetic and the real user.

Synthetic is about uptime, Page speed analysis, and transaction monitoring. For the real user, one knows how end users interact with your site.

One also gets to compare metrics and understand visitors’ experiences. They offer a 14-day trial period, or you can use it for free.

On our page, these are metrics found. Their solutions, too, were simple and easy to implement. Use it to optimize your website for greater speed.

e. WebPageTest

It’s a simple yet advanced web testing tool for everyone. This platform assigns grades from A to F based on performance.

They also give recommendations on changes to make. WebPageTest has an in-depth analysis of your website.

Try it and better your site. These five platforms will give you an understanding of your website performance and how to improve it.

Try them and use their recommendations that best fit your website. 

Seven things that optimize your website for greater speed

1. Minimize javascript and plugins

Many unused JavaScript and plugins hinder your site’s performance and speed. They use up resources that would be used to load your site.

Change this by removing unwanted JavaScript and using tools like the Autoptimize plugin to optimize the JavaScript.

As for plugins, only install the needed plugins and remove unwanted plugins. Also, make sure your plugins are up-to-date.

Save your resources and transform your website instantly. Give your clients the best user experience and get the best yields.

The five tools mentioned above give a detailed report on how to do it.

2. Use Content Delivery Network

It’s one of the best tools that instantly deliver content by reducing information request delays. A CDN replicates your website copies across servers around the world.

Also, it reduces web traffic to the web server, uses less bandwidth, and renders your applications more user-friendly.

Anyone can reach your site instantly, as this tool reduces loading time. Server resources are saved, and site performance is improved.

Optimize your website for a greater speed with CDN. Watch it yield the best results as it grows and becomes user-friendly.

3. Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests

These are the calls that a browser sends to a web server for information on a web page. More requests mean faster web access.

As your site grows, these HTTP requests pile up, causing a perceptible delay between user click-throughs and page loading.

However, all these can be changed easily. Using a CDN will help you limit requests made and improves your overall site performance.

4. Choose the best host and hosting plans

Several elements, such as your provider’s location and the total capacity of their network connection, could affect speed.

The kind of web hosting your website uses can also have an impact. Choosing suitable options will change your overall site performance.

Try using a VPS or a dedicated server for your website. At Truehost, we offer the best plans and top-notch services.

Try us, watch your yields grow, and give your clients the best experience.

5. Use a Load Balancer

It’s a simple way of redirecting traffic from users to a server pool. Your website resources are saved, and access becomes instant.

A load balancer functions as the traffic cop standing before your servers, distributing client requests among all servers capable of doing so. 

It amplifies speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could impair performance. 

In case of a single server fails the load balancer transfers the traffic to the remaining online servers. The load balancer sends requests automatically when a new server is added to the server group.

6. Enable compression

The practice of compression enables one to save resources. Files are reduced without compromising them.

The more file sizes you can minimize without losing quality, the better your website’s performance. 

Gzip is one of the most solid and dependable compression frameworks. Alternative approaches can also produce smaller file sizes without compromising the user experience.

7. Utilize website caching

It’s a browser technique that allows browsers to preload websites. When this occurs, accessing a site becomes instantaneous.

The SiteGround Optimizer plugin is a beautiful option for an all-in-one optimization plugin, with many opportunities for caching and other features that may drastically speed up any WordPress website.

It’s free, simple to use, and loaded with premium features like GZIP compression, CSS, JavaScript, HTML minification, and many caching settings.

These are just a few practices to ensure your site speed improves. Practice good website management and watch your site transform.

Finally;

Optimizing your website for more incredible speed is that easy! Speed plays a significant role in retaining users on your page.

Grow your site by making it user-friendly. Earn more returns by making accessing content on your website easy and fast.