Speed optimisation.
What is speed optimisation?
Speed optimisation is optimising the time it takes for a website to load. You know it yourself, if a website doesn’t respond almost immediately, you quickly lose patience and close the site. So do your visitors, and if your website isn’t speed optimised, you potentially lose the opportunity for a new customer.
Why is speed optimisation important?
Do you want to keep your visitors on your website for longer and rank higher on Google?
Then it’s a good idea to check whether you need speed optimisation.
To get the most out of the organic traffic you already have on your website, it’s important that users stay on your site for as long as possible. Although it doesn’t sound like much, a few seconds can be far too long for a website to load. If it takes more than 3 seconds, you can assume that your potential customer has already moved on to the competition.
The most important thing about speed optimisation is to ensure that the technology behind it is not working overtime. When you speed-optimise your website, the goal is that your website loads only the data and information that the visitor is looking at, rather than also constantly loading unnecessary files, code, and scripts. Your visitors should have the best possible experience on your website regardless of device and broadband connection.
As well as being important to your visitors, having a speed-optimised website is also something that Google likes. In fact, Google ranks your website higher if you speed optimise your website, as it provides a better user experience. So, you’ll get more visitors and a higher Google ranking by speed optimising your website.
When your website is fast, you get a lower bounce rate because visitors don’t get impatient. For example, by having a fast page, you don’t waste Google Ads ad money on clicks, and your page isn’t penalised in terms of SEO because Google detects that visitors are happy with the loading time.
How do you optimise speed?
Content compression.
There are several ways to optimise the speed of your website. One of them is that you can compress your content. For example, you can compress your images so that they take up less space. The smaller the content, the faster your website will work, and your visitors will have a better user experience. In fact, studies show that visit times are longer when your website is fast. You lose fewer users, and your conversion rate improves.
Images can typically be compressed quite a lot without losing their quality. It’s a good idea to first figure out what size you need your images to be and then compress them properly. There are also file formats that are better and faster to use than others for your videos and images.
CSS and JavaScript.
You can also optimise the speed of your website by looking at JavaScript. JavaScript is a dynamic programming language that, among other things, allows your website to become interactive, for example through animations or videos. If JavaScript is heavy, it affects your website’s speed.
It can help to clean up the coding on your website so that only the necessary coding remains. You can furthermore compress and merge JavaScript files, which also helps to increase the speed of your website. Additionally, it is possible to delay loading the JavaScript code until it is needed.
As with JavaScript, you can also compress, merge, and remove unnecessary CCS code.
WordPress and plugins.
If you have a WordPress site, it’s also important that you don’t have more plugins than you need. A plugin is a piece of software that acts as an add-on to another computer program.
Even if you have inactive plugins, they can still take up resources. Therefore, if they are not used, they should be deleted. Normally for a website you should have about 10-15 plugins, and for a webshop it is 20-25 plugins. Therefore, there is a work in removing as many plugins as possible. You should check which plugins are actually being used and then assess whether the active plugins are necessary or if they are just “nice to have” instead of “need to have”.
Do you need help?
At design concern, we can check your website speed to see if we can help you optimise it.
We know CSS, JavaScript, AMP, file formats, and compression, so you don’t have to. You can contact Thor on +45 22 22 28 56 to find out more about the possibility of speed optimising your website with our help.