Page speed is one of the most important ranking factors in 2021. Google declared in official blog that it is obsessed by speed. They included the new signal in search algorithm in 2010. From 2010, the site speed factor is gaining lots of importance in Google’s ranking algorithm.
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| Factors For Improving Web Page Speed |
No matter how great your site looks, however useful your content is, if your webpage loads slowly in the browser it may not appear in the top results for the search query.
There are many tools online to evaluate the site speed.
Slow from Yahoo!, Page Speed add-on from Mozilla Firefox are some of the free tools which help you to evaluate your site speed.
Let’s see the top 10 ways which help to speed up your website in 2021!
1. Use external CSS to load all the background images.
It’s not a good practice anymore to load the background images directly from the HTML file.
You must call up the background images with the help of external CSS stylesheet. If the background images are called by the CSS file, they load after all the content is displayed on the browser.
First, the text loads instantaneously and then the background images are loaded. Thereby improving the site speed tremendously.
Link the stylesheet in the head section of HTML file. Now, the users can browse the content while your background image is still loading.
2. Remove unnecessary Javascript.
Client-side script elements like Javascript or VBScript tend to slow down the webpage.
When you are using CMS or blogging software like WordPress or Joomla, check out the JavaScript and remove the unnecessary elements from the code.
Even the JavaScript can be added to external JavaScript file and linked in the head section of HTML file. Place all the unimportant client-side functional elements in a separate file or remove them completely if they are unnecessary.
Read more: Best Web 2.0 Sites For SEO & Link Building Strategies
3. Remove the unnecessary Metadata
We all know that meta description and meta keywords are important to tell search engines about the content on our website.
They play a crucial part in on-page search engine optimization. But in recent times they lost their credibility because of lots of keyword stuffing and abuse.
They are not so important now. So keep the meta description under 180 characters and just put 4-6 keywords in meta keywords tag. Removing all the unnecessary meta keywords and meta descriptions helps to improve your website speed tremendously.
Don’t Forgot to read: What is Search Engine Result Page (SERP) -A complete Guide
4. Image Optimization
Images decrease your page speed. You need to optimize all your images on the website.
We have write a separate guide on Image Optimization for website speed.
Especially the ones which load in all the web pages like header image, logo or footer images. By optimizing the images properly you can decrease their load time without sacrificing much on the quality.
Websites like Wikipedia load faster because of the low image content in their web pages. You can optimize the images with the help of Adobe Photoshop software easily.
Just open the image in Adobe Photoshop. Go to the File menu and click on Save and save the image as “Save for Web” in JPG file format. It reduces at least 60% of the image file size.
5. Use file compression software like Gzip
From last few years, there is an incredible amount of software being developed just to increase the page speed. If your CSS, JavaScript and HTML files are larger than 150 bytes, you can reduce their size by using the Gzip software.
Please note that this software is not for your image files. Photoshop is good to compress your image file without reducing their quality. Gzip is a perfect solution to compress the CSS, JavaScript and HTML files.
6. Use CDNs.
CDNs are Content Delivery networks, also known as Content Distribution Networks.
They share the load of your content delivery among the network of servers. Multiple copies of your website are stored in the number of data centers across the globe.
Users can access your website faster as the CDNs deliver the content from the nearby data center.
7. Remove the unnecessary redirects.
Those times where we used to play with redirects are gone. Whenever your page redirects to a different webpage, the user faces delay time and has to wait till the request-response HTTP cycle to be complete.
Now, every second count! Try to optimize your website with least number of redirects.
For example, if your redirect pattern for your mobile users is yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com to m.yoursite.com to m.yoursite.com/home, the page loads a lot slower because of these unnecessary redirects.
8. Make use of AMP project
To provide the web with necessary page speed boost, Google has come with a new project called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project.
It is easy to implement and improves the speed of your mobile site. Read the documentation online on how to use AMP on your mobile site.
Read more: How to REALLY Make Money From Local SEO
9. Enable Browser Caching
Whenever a user enters your website in the browser, the browser has to load lots of things like CSS file, logo, HTML file, Javascript file and many other resources.
So, if we enable browser caching, all the regular resources of our website will be stored on the local hard drive of the user’s computer.
So the logo, CSS file, HTML file and other regular files need not be loaded again if the user navigates to the other web page.
This is the most important factor in improving your site speed. Your pages load much faster as most of the resources are already stored in browser’s cache.
10. Upgrade your PHP code.
Blogging content management systems like WordPress are still using the older versions of PHP. So, it is a massive deal to make everyone use PHP7.
The older versions of PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.2 are not safe anymore. They are not supported to improve the web page speed. Yoast (the developers of Yoast SEO WordPress plugin) has come up with a new project called WHIP.
This enables the WordPress blogs to move to PHP 7 which helps a lot in boosting the page speed and improving the security.
Though we have put together ten factors which help in improving the page speed in 2021, there are much more coming up really fast.
Keep learning new things. Check your page speed regularly with the help of free online tools.
Frequently log in to Google Webmasters Console to check your site performance. Page speed is not just important for search engine ranking, it also plays a huge role in grabbing a customer. Who wants to browse a slow loading website?
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