As of 2024, there are currently more than 33 million businesses operating in the US. So if you run your own business then competition is fierce. To succeed, you need to build a recognizable brand and help customers buy your products and services.
However, for this to work your website needs to be up to scratch. If you're wondering how to improve website loading speed then you've come to the right place.
Read on to find out everything you need to know about how to speed up a website so your customers can use it easily.
Why is Website Loading Speed Important?
On average, people will only wait 3 seconds for a webpage to load. If it doesn't load in this time then they may abandon the website altogether. This means that a poor page speed score could cost you customers and an average conversion rate.
Here’s how boosting your website speed benefits your business:
- Higher engagement and conversions. Faster load times make browsing more enjoyable, encouraging visitors to explore your site further and increasing the chances they will purchase your products or services.
- Improved search rankings. Search engines like Google reward fast-loading websites with higher rankings. This means your site will appear more prominently in search results, helping you attract new customers more easily.
- Increased online visibility. When people stay on your site longer due to better performance, it sends positive signals to search engines, which can further improve your site’s ranking.
But before we explain how you improve your website loading speed, let’s figure out what speed you currently have.
Best Performance Evaluation Tools to Evaluate Your Speed
Only after evaluating your website's performance, you’ll be able to identify areas that need improvement. Choose any of the 5 top analysis tools below for detailed insights into your site's speed and actionable recommendations.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Analyzes website performance on desktop and mobile, providing suggestions for improvement and key metrics like Interactive Paint (INP).
- Pros: Easy to use and accessible for beginners. Provides actionable suggestions tailored to performance metrics.
- Cons: Can sometimes provide conflicting recommendations. Limited historical data tracking.
Best for: Website owners and developers looking for quick performance insights and actionable tips.
2. Lighthouse
An open-source tool by Google that audits performance, SEO, accessibility, and best practices. It can be run from Chrome DevTools for detailed insights.
- Pros: Comprehensive reports covering multiple aspects of web performance. Regularly updated to align with industry standards.
- Cons: Requires some technical knowledge to fully understand and utilize. Limited in real-time monitoring capabilities.
Best for: Developers and SEO professionals wanting a thorough assessment of their website across multiple metrics.
3. GTmetrix
Offers a detailed performance report that includes page load time, total page size, and a waterfall chart to visualize load times for each element.
- Pros: Comprehensive analysis with visual data representation. Allows for tracking historical performance over time.
- Cons: Some advanced features require a paid plan. May present overwhelming data for beginners.
Best for: Web developers and analysts needing in-depth performance analysis with historical tracking capabilities.
4. Pingdom Tools
Monitors real-time website performance from various global locations, evaluating the impact of different elements on load times.
- Pros: Real-time monitoring from multiple locations for accurate performance assessment. User-friendly interface with easy-to-read reports.
- Cons: Limited free version; full features require a subscription. May not provide as much detail as other tools.
Best for: Site administrators and marketers who want to monitor ongoing performance and response times globally.
5. WebPageTest
Provides an in-depth analysis of the website loading process, featuring waterfall charts, performance grades, and detailed resource usage reports.
- Pros:
- Highly customizable tests, including device and connection settings.
- Offers advanced insights for troubleshooting performance issues.
- Cons:
- The user interface can be intimidating for beginners.
- Some features may be less intuitive.
Best for: Technical users and developers who need detailed performance diagnostics and want to troubleshoot specific issues.
11 Key Areas of Website Speed Optimization
Every element on your site plays a role in your website’s performance. From the invisible redirects through visuals that define your brand’s style to the backend mechanisms – each of these components is an essential piece of the performance puzzle.
- Visuals. Compressing visuals is one of the most effective ways to reduce load time.
- Fonts. Typography is key to branding, but it can slow down your site if not optimized.
- Code. Compress JS, CSS, and HTML files to minimize unnecessary data transfer.
- Caching. Storing commonly used site data locally on a user's browser or server reduces the number of requests made to load content, drastically improving speed.
- Prefetching. Anticipate user actions and load content before it's requested.
- Content Delivery Network. Distribute your content across multiple servers worldwide.
- Databases. Improve performance by clearing out unnecessary data.
- Server-Side optimization. Upgrade your hosting and use SSD storage to ensure that your backend infrastructure can handle requests efficiently.
- Third-party Items. Remove unused plugins and optimize third-party scripts.
- SEO. Regularly audit and fix SEO issues to keep your website performing at its best.
- Mobile optimization. Responsive techniques can boost your website speed on mobile.
Let’s take a closer look at key areas that influence website speed and how to optimize them for a smoother, faster user experience. And if you're running a Magento store, check out our Magento speed optimization guide for specific tips.
Visuals: How to Improve Website Loading Speed via Image Optimization
Images play a key role in creating a visually appealing website. But if not optimized, they can significantly slow down your page loading speed. Image optimization is what ensures your site loads quickly without sacrificing quality.
Below are some techniques to enhance your website’s speed through proper image management.
Compress and Resize Images
Large image files are one of the most common causes of slow-loading websites. When you compress and resize images, you reduce their file size while maintaining visual quality, ensuring faster load times.
You can use image compression tools like TinyPNG, LitePix, Kraken, or JPEGmini to shrink large image files. These tools reduce the file size without compromising quality.
Consider resizing your images to match the display dimensions on your site to avoid loading oversized files, too. Using an HTML responsive srcset attribute can automatically adjust the image size based on the user’s device, further improving load times.
Read More: A Guide to Quickly Compressing Images for Shopify
Convert to Next-Gen Image Formats
Traditional image formats like JPEG and PNG are less efficient in terms of file size compared to newer formats. Next-gen formats like WebP or AVIF offer superior compression, reducing file sizes without losing quality. Try converting your images to these formats – and you’ll see your loading time get drastically cut down.
Implement Lazy Loading for Images
Lazy loading is an advanced technique that defers the loading of images until they are needed—that is, when the user scrolls to the section where the images are located. This reduces the initial page load time by loading only the images in view.
To implement lazy loading, you can use the loading="lazy" attribute on your images.
Fonts: How to Increase Website Speed by Optimizing Text
Like visuals, fonts are an important part of your site’s design and branding, but they can also slow down loading times if not optimized. Streamline the use of fonts and apply the right techniques to improve performance without sacrificing style.
Limit Font Weights and Styles
Each additional font weight or style requires a separate file to be loaded. To optimize speed, limit the number of font weights and styles used on your website. Stick to only what's necessary for your design to reduce the number of requests.
Use System Fonts
Whenever possible, use system fonts that are already installed on users' devices. System fonts don’t require external downloads, which eliminates additional requests and speeds up your site.
Implement Font-Display: Swap
Using the font-display: swap property in CSS allows the browser to display a fallback font until the preferred web font is fully loaded. This technique improves perceived load time, ensuring that text is visible immediately, even if the custom font takes a moment to load.
Code: How to Improve Website Speed via JS/CSS Minification
Reducing the size of your website’s files can help you achieve faster loading times. Two primary methods for minimizing the amount of data that needs to be transferred are compression and minification, both of which help streamline your site's resources without affecting functionality.
Implement Gzip or Brotli Compression
Large files aren’t limited to images – your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files can be enormous, too. Enable Gzip or Brotli compression to reduce the size of your key client-end files, allowing them to be delivered faster to users' browsers. These compression methods work by sending the files in a compressed format that is automatically unzipped by the browser, maintaining a seamless user experience.
To implement Gzip or Brotli compression, you can either modify your server’s configuration or use website optimization tools and plugins.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Every additional JavaScript, CSS, or HTML file generates an HTTP request, which can slow down your website.
Minification reduces the size of these files by removing unnecessary characters, such as whitespace, line breaks, and comments. This optimizes the file size without altering the functionality of your website.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Optimizer,Grunt, and Script Minifier can help you automatically minify your code, cutting down the number of requests and making your site more efficient.
Combine Files
Another strategy to reduce HTTP requests is to combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one. By grouping these files, you reduce the number of server requests made, allowing your website to load faster. Many website optimization tools, as well as manual file merging, can help achieve this goal.
Caching: How to Make Website Load Faster by Enabling Cache
Caching is a powerful way to improve website speed, especially for high-traffic sites. It works by storing a version of your site so it doesn't have to fully reload every time a user visits. This reduces the load on your server and improves response times.
Implement Browser Caching
Browser caching allows static assets – images, stylesheets, and scripts – to be stored locally on a user’s device. When users revisit your website, their browser doesn’t need to download these files again, making subsequent visits much faster.
Enabling browser caching involves configuring your server to set expiration times for various assets, allowing them to be stored for a specific duration before being refreshed.
Set Cache Expiration Headers
Expiration headers are HTTP headers that indicate the duration for which a resource can be cached before it needs to be revalidated or fetched again from the server. Configuring cache expiration headers for static content is one of the best practices for site speed optimization.
Consider setting longer expiration times for assets that don’t change frequently – like logos or CSS frameworks – to significantly enhance loading speeds. This way, some resources can be served directly from the cache on subsequent visits rather than being re-downloaded each time a user accesses the site.
Use Server-Side Caching
While browser caching focuses on storing content on user devices, server-side caching optimizes how your server handles dynamic content. By caching frequently requested data, such as database queries and full-page content, server-side caching reduces the need for repeated processing and significantly boosts overall performance.
Popular caching mechanisms like Redis, Varnish, and Memcached store this data in memory, allowing your server to retrieve it faster. These tools are especially effective for dynamic sites like Magento, where real-time data and complex queries can slow down load times.
To maximize the benefits of server-side caching, implement cache warming. Cache warming pre-loads key pages into the cache, ensuring that the most critical pages (like product or category pages) are readily available to users without any delays. Without cache warming, the first user to visit a page after it’s cleared will still experience a slower load time. To streamline this process in Magento 2, consider using tools like Amasty’s Cache Warmer.
Prefetching: How to Improve Page Performance with Preloading
Prefetching and preloading are proactive methods that anticipate user actions, allowing your server to load resources in advance. These techniques can help reduce perceived load times, making your website feel faster and more responsive.
Implement DNS Prefetching
DNS prefetching speeds up the resolution of external resources by resolving domain names before a user clicks on a link. By enabling DNS prefetching, your site can reduce the time needed for DNS lookups, improving the user experience, especially when dealing with third-party resources.
Use Link Prefetching
With link prefetching, your website preloads resources that are likely to be needed next, such as "Next" buttons or common navigation links. This allows your site to serve the next page or resource more quickly, anticipating user actions.
Pre-connect to External Resources
For critical external resources like fonts, analytics, or API requests, pre-connect establishes connections early in the loading process. It helps reduce latency by setting up necessary connections before the browser even requests the files, speeding up load times for external content.
Content Delivery Networks: How to Boost Website Speed via CDNs
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a powerful tool to improve website speed by distributing content across multiple servers worldwide. Let’s look at how you can take advantage of a CDN.
Implement SSL with CDN
Security and speed go hand in hand. Ensuring that your SSL certificate is properly integrated with your CDN allows for secure, encrypted connections while maintaining high-speed performance. This ensures that your users' data is protected without slowing down your site.
Offer Geo-Replication of Content
Geo-replication allows you to store copies of your website’s content in different geographical regions. This minimizes the distance between users and servers, ensuring faster delivery of your website’s content, especially for international visitors.
Reduce Main Server Load
When you host your website on a single server, all user requests are processed through the same hardware, which can cause delays during high traffic. Using a CDN and storing copies of your site’s content across several servers lets you distribute the load on your main server because you entrust different servers to handle various requests.
Databases: How to Improve Site Performance via DB Optimization
Already large and constantly growing further, databases can slow down server response times. To maintain optimal loading speeds, you need to properly streamline your database.
Clean Up Your Database
Over time, your CMS database can accumulate unnecessary data such as old revisions, drafts, and unused content. Regularly cleaning up your database reduces bloat, making it easier for your server to retrieve information. Consider scheduling routine clean-ups to ensure your database remains optimized and clutter-free.
Use Database Optimization Tools
To simplify the optimization process, you can also leverage WP-Optimize (for WordPress) or similar tools. These plugins automatically clear out unused data, optimize database tables, and improve query execution. Automating this task will keep your site lean and responsive without manual database management.
Index Database Tables
Properly indexed database tables can significantly improve query performance, reducing the time it takes for your server to deliver content to users. Make sure your database tables are indexed correctly to speed up data retrieval, especially for sites with high traffic or complex data structures.
Server-Side Optimization: How to Improve Website Performance on the Back End
The foundation of your website’s performance is its hosting environment. A slow server can severely affect page load speed, particularly the Time to First Byte (TTFB) – a key metric that measures the responsiveness of your server. A good TTFB is under 200 milliseconds, and optimizing your server is important to achieving that.
Enable HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
For even faster loading times, consider upgrading your website’s protocol to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3. These newer protocols support multiplexing, which allows multiple requests to be sent over a single connection, speeding up the loading of CSS, JavaScript, and image files. This is a significant improvement over HTTP/1.1, which processes requests sequentially.
Implement Server Push
Another effective technique to improve website speed is leveraging Server Push especially when using HTTP/2. Server Push allows your server to send multiple resources (e.g., CSS, JavaScript, fonts) to the client before they are requested. This reduces the wait time for the browser to initiate new requests, speeding up page rendering.
For example, if your page requires certain CSS or JavaScript files to load properly, Server Push can send these resources as soon as the HTML response starts, ensuring they are ready when the browser needs them.
Upgrade Hosting Plans
One of the quickest ways to improve website speed is to upgrade your hosting plan. Shared hosting may be cost-effective, but it can slow down your site as resources are shared among multiple websites. By switching to VPS (Virtual Private Server) or cloud hosting, you get dedicated resources, which translates to faster performance and better scalability.
Use Servers with SSD Storage
Choosing SSD (Solid-State Drive)-based hosting over traditional HDD (Hard Disk Drive) can greatly enhance data retrieval speeds. SSDs provide faster access to data, which means that the files on your server are delivered more quickly to your visitors.
Third-party Items: How to Increase Web Page Speed via Plugin and Script Purge
While plugins and third-party scripts can enhance functionality, they can also burden your website’s performance. Optimizing and reducing the number of plugins and scripts can help you considerably speed up sites.
Reduce or Remove Unnecessary Plugins
If they are outdated or poorly optimized, plugins can negatively affect your website. Reducing plugin load can free up valuable server resources and improve page speed.
Start by auditing the plugins on your site to determine which ones you no longer need. Uninstall unused plugins and ensure the remaining ones are fully updated. After removing unnecessary plugins, run a performance test to identify any remaining bottlenecks.
Optimize Third-Party Scripts
Third-party scripts – such as social media widgets, analytics tools, or ads – can introduce significant delays to your website. Make sure to limit the number of third-party scripts and enable asynchronous loading that allows scripts to load independently. This way, your page can continue to render even if a third-party script takes longer to load.
SEO: How to Speed Up Site by Reducing Errors and Redirects
Errors and redirects, especially 404 errors and redirect chains, can cause unnecessary delays in page loading. Cleaning up broken links and minimizing redirects can help streamline your site’s performance and reduce the burden on your server.
Reduce 404 Errors
404 errors occur when a user tries to access a page that no longer exists, forcing the server to process the request and return an error. These errors can slow down your site and create a poor user experience.
Regularly scan for broken links using tools like Atomseo or dedicated plugins to identify and resolve 404 errors. Removing or redirecting these pages can eliminate unnecessary load times.
Minimize Redirect Chains
Redirect chains happen when a user is directed through multiple URLs before landing on the final page. Each redirect generates an extra HTTP request, which can slow down your site and frustrate users.
SEO tools like Screaming Frog can help you identify and fix redirect chains. To improve performance, ensure that links point directly to the final URL, reducing the number of redirects needed.
Mobile Optimization: How to Accelerate Mobile Performance
With more users accessing websites on mobile devices and Google keeping mobile speeds in high regard, you can’t ignore mobile speed datal. A slow mobile site can frustrate visitors and lead to higher bounce rates.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
AMP is a framework designed to create fast-loading mobile pages. It strips down your content to the essentials, removing unnecessary elements that slow down page rendering. While this may limit some functionality, AMP ensures that your mobile pages load almost instantly, enhancing the experience for mobile users.
Responsive Design and Mobile-First Approach
In addition to AMP, ensure your site employs responsive design to adapt to various screen sizes. This is essential for improving mobile speed and usability. Adopting a mobile-first approach to design prioritizes performance on mobile devices, which often have slower connections and less processing power compared to desktops.
Test and Boost Your Website Load Speed Now
Improving your website speed can greatly enhance user experience and boost search rankings. While some fixes are simple, others may require more in-depth adjustments, but all of them will significantly contribute to faster loading times.
Want to go even faster? Reach out to our team – and we’ll help you achieve optimal performance.
