What are the best tips and tricks to improve the speed of your website? Today, most people are using smartphones and tablets, which means they expect to access your website quickly. But is it really possible to improve page load time?
We all know that website loading speed is important. However, when was the last time you actually tried to improve it? Most likely, it’s never happened before.
But now, with this quick guide, I will give you my most recommended tip needed to optimize your website speed and boost its performance.
Before we get started, let’s get a better understanding of what website speed actually means.
How Does It Work?
Page load speed is the amount of time it takes for your browser to download and display a web page. This includes all the images, videos, and other content that are part of the page. The loading speed of a page has a direct impact on the overall experience of the visitor. If the page loads slowly, it will create an unpleasant user experience. People today expect websites to load within 3 seconds. Anything slower than that, and they will simply move on to another website.
So How Can We Improve Our Website’s Loading Speed?
If you’re just looking for a quick improvement, then the best thing you can do is minimize your website’s file size at best you can. Common methods to do this involve you minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but personally the first thing I deduce when running audits for my clients is images.
Image Optimization
There’s a reason why we’re talking about images. Images are a big part of the problem. When you use too many images, it can slow down your website, especially when you decide not to optimize them. Having 20 images, each of which being roughly a Megabyte (mb) or two is one of the core reasons your site is taking a long time to load.
Luckily, you can make images smaller and load them faster by using any variety of image optimization tools.
You can do this manually, or you can use an automated tool. For example, I typically find myself gravitating towards utilizing “Compressor.io” which is an image compression service, which means that it reduces the size of your images. It does so by either reducing the resolution of your image or by removing details. However, there are two main types of compression: lossy and lossless. A lossy compression removes details of your image. It is useful for small images because it reduces the size of your image without destroying it. It is not recommended for large images because it reduces the quality of your image. A lossless compression does not alter the image. It is recommended for large images because it does not lose any details. It is not recommended for small images because it takes much more time. Compressor.io offers you the possibility to choose which type of compression you prefer.
I am not affiliated in any shape way or form with “Compressor.io“, nor am I for other image optimization tools, it is just my usual first choice as it allows customizability such as resizing. Some other alternatives I use are “Optimizilla” as well as “Bulk Resize”
Conclusion
But using these tools to compress 20mb worth of images into 1.5mb is crucial to ensure a low page size thus reducing the amount of time it takes for a users browser to download and display your website, and it is for this reason why my #1 Tip to Optimizing Your Website Speed is Image Optimization. Looking to discern how much space your images take? Read my article of Yellow Lab Tools.
