The Need For Page Speed Optimization

Website Speed The Need For Page Speed Optimization By Elinsys, 03rd Aug 2020

To understand page speed optimization, let us first understand how web pages are loaded. A user goes to a browser and types the address of a website. A request is sent to the DNS. This then points at your domain name provider like GoDaddy or BigRock etc. This in turn points the request to your server where your files are located. And then the DOM begins to load the HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It will not load all the files at once. Typically, the DOM requests additional resources from your server and that’s where things could start getting slow – if not optimized.

Issues that could be slowing down your site – the most common culprits:

Large images are the biggest culprits of slow loading web pages.
Hosting issues could be another cause
Plugins, apps and widgets – basically any third party scripts that is added could slow down the loading of web pages.
The theme you choose could also be one of the reasons.
Redirects and the number of hops that are required to get to the webpage also defines how fast the page will load.
Finally, there’s the JavaScript that you need to worry about.

All of this impacts the website speed – but let’s get to the part about what you can do to improve it.

Page speed – how to check and improve?

Google expects a quality website to load anywhere between two to three seconds. The faster the better.

Chrome User Experience Report: This is Chrome real user metrics. This is only available for larger, popular websites and it’s housed on BigQuery so works on some basic SQL.
Lighthouse: Lighthouse is available in Chrome Dev Tools and you can simply click on Inspect Element and then go to Audit to run a Lighthouse report in your browser.
Page Speed Insights: Page Speed Insights has now incorporated Chrome User Experience Report. If you aren’t a large site it may not be able to measure actual speed.

Ways to improve your page speed

HTTP/2 can definitely speed things up.

Preconnect, prefetch, preload: Even Google uses this for its SERPs. Google prefetches some URLs so that it is faster for you if you were to click on the results. You can speed up the loading process on your site.

Enable caching and use content delivery network (CDN). Set up caching for your website. Content delivery networks also make sure that your site’s content loads fast.

Compress images: Again, images are one of the main culprits. Make sure that you compress them. There are a number of tools available to do that. Optimizilla is one of them. You can use a number of free tools too.

Minify resources: Minification is the bundling and compression of resources. It can definitely add to the page speed.

Page speed is important – not only from a search engine point of view, but from a user experience point of view too. Technology is consumed by a generation that was born with the need for speed. Everything that is quick is good and they have no patience for slow loading web pages – a few second more than your competitor and you’ve lost a visitor!