How To Increase Website Speed

Everyone will be annoyed waiting for a long website loading time, as website owners, we have to think about that. Web loading speed plays a very important role in improving the user experience. Therefore we should not only focus on great and attractive website design but ignore website speed.

Even though your website design is very good, it will not necessarily get a lot of traffic if you ignore the web speed factor. Users expect your website to open completely within 3 to 5 seconds.

If your web speed is more than 5 seconds, then your website traffic will decrease. According to research, every 1 second the increase in web loading time will decrease conversions by 7%.

In fact, Google has also implemented that web speed is one of the factors determining the position of a website in search engines. If you want to get a position on the first page of Google then you must pay attention to web speed.

Tool To Check Website Speed

GTMetrix
Pagespeed Insight
Lighthouse Google Chrome
Google Chrome coverage

Factors Affecting Website Speed

There are several factors that affect website speed, the optimization process on these factors will increase web speed. Here are some factors that affect website speed and how to optimize it:

Large CSS and JS Files

The most influencing factors for website speed are large CSS and JavaScript files. Both of these files must be optimized. If your website uses a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others, you can find plugins that can optimize CSS and JS files. For example autoptimize for WordPress and adv_agg for drupal.

This plugin/module will help you minify, aggregate, inline and combine CSS, JS and HTML files. Use website speed checking tools like gtmetrix and pagespeed insights, from the results you will know which files still need optimization.

Even though your website doesn’t use a CMS, you can still check your website on gtmetrix or pagespeed insights. But the difference is you have to optimize the CSS and JS files manually. Minify and combine CSS and JS files on the website to increase web speed.

Read: Optimize Your Website And Get the First Page of Google Search Result

Hosting or Server Speed

The wrong choice of hosting or server will make your website slow. You should consult a website developer or server administrator before making your choice, as they can provide the best advice for your needs.

You have to calculate how much possible traffic you will get in the future so that it can be a reference in choosing shared hosting, cloud hosting or a server. Using a large database should also be considered because it is not good to use shared hosting when a website uses a large database.

Check the website using gtmetrix or pagespeed insights, from the “server response time” results you will see whether your website requires more hosting resources or not. Cloud hosting that already uses SSD is usually faster, the resource can also be increased when your website gets more traffic.

Incorrect Image Size

Using a large image size greatly affects the speed of the website, using the “save for web” option in Photoshop will help reduce the size of the image. If possible, reduce image quality by up to 70% to obtain a smaller image size.

The image size on the website page must be adjusted, scale your image in the CSS code based on your needs. Check your website using gtmetrix or pagespeed insights, in the section “Properly size images” you will see images that need optimization.

The JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and WebP image formats have higher compression characteristics and quality. Using this image format will increase web loading speed and reduce data usage when accessing the website.

Too Much Use of Widgets and Plugins

Developing a website using a CMS like WordPress requires several widgets and plugins. The more you use widgets and plugins, the slower your website will be. Because these widgets and plugins also use different CSS and JS files.

Use widgets and plugins as needed and check whether the plugins you use have a big effect on web speed. To check for plugins that are causing a slow website you can use the inspection tool provided by google chrome “Coverage”. We will discuss how to use coverage in the next article.

Read: Planning keywords using 7 keyword planner tools

Image Hotlinking

Image hotlinking or often called hotlinks have an impact on the speed of the hosting or server you use, of course, it will also have an impact on the speed of your website. Someone uses an image URL on your website to display the same image on their website. When people visit the website they are still pulled from your hosting.

Imagine if he displays a large number of images and his website visitors increase, then your hosting resources will be used for their benefit. Your hosting will be slower and will have an effect on website speed. This can be prevented by adding code to the .htaccess file. Add the following code to your website .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond% {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ $
RewriteCond% {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ Http (s)?: // (www \.)? Yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond% {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ Http (s)?: // (www \.)? Yourdomain2.com [NC]
RewriteRule \. (Jpg | jpeg | png | gif) $ http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif [NC, R, L]

Conclusion

Website speed is a very important factor to optimize. This affects the user experience and the position of the web in search engines. Website speed is more important than great interface design. The faster your website is accessed, the more website visitors and conversions you will get.

If you want to increase your web speed but are not used to it, our team is ready to help you. SWS Digital Agency provides website speed optimization services to increase your website speed. Call us through the contact page.