Many people underestimate the importance of site download speed, but let’s consider from the perspective of the client. You enter a site that feels downloaded for about 100 years, going to the page for a long time uploaded content, especially images. Your feelings? You’re annoyed, you don’t need anything anymore. According to such a slow site you won’t return.
That’s why it’s so important to monitor the speed of downloading all pages of your resource to keep the attention of users, and therefore improve the position of the site in its ranking. Today we will talk about several ways from SEObanda to improve this indicator in SEO-promotion.
Analyzing the current site download speed
In order to optimize the site and improve its download speed you need to analyze the current speed. Because understanding the results will help us identify key areas of concern for improvement.
At Seobanda, we use certain tools to measure download speeds, such as Google Page Speed Insights. We look at certain indicators such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), which is responsible for measuring the download speed of the largest part of the content page, and from 2024 on INP (Interaction to Next Paint), instead of FID (First Input Delay) which will measure the time between the user interaction and the subsequent visual response. Tracking these performance metrics helps us optimize sites to ensure the best possible user experience.
Image optimization
One of the easiest ways of improving Google Page Speed, but one of the most powerful is image optimization. And we can reduce both the weight and the size of the image, using compression without loss of quality. Heavy and large images often become the main problem when downloading the site, which is as much as possible to get rid of. We also use a specific PNG 1x format for regular pictures or SVG for the transmission of logos.
In addition, sometimes we use lazy loading images. This method allows you to upload animated content as needed, asynchronously loading the rest of the page. Pictures won’t delay the display of the main content, which will speed up the work of the site.
CSS and JavaScript minimization
Besides image optimization, we also clean the code. It often happens that the code accumulates enough scripts or clipped sections, duplicate plugins or banal syntax errors such as extra characters or spaces. Due to such moments the weight of the code increases and it’s harder to understand, which negatively affects the site’s SEO-indicators.
Depending on the situation, code minimization is done manually or with automated tools such as Gzip compression, custom code collector plugins, and online minimizers. We understand the importance of the balance between minimization and code readability, because in the future it will affect the difficulty of development and debugging
Caching usage
Caching is an effective way to significantly speed up the download of websites. Let’s look at some of the basic types of caching that we use, namely on the browser and server side, and how they work.
When a user visits a website, the browser caches certain files (CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally on the visitor’s computer. When you visit the site again, these files are downloaded from the browser cache rather than from the server, which speeds up the process of downloading pages.
The server caches frequently requested pages or fragments of them in RAM. When these pages are requested, the server gives a cached version instead of dynamic generation, which reduces the load on the server.
Use asynchronous content upload
We have already mentioned about asynchronous downloading, in particular this applies to images, you can also apply to the video on the site. Asynchronous loading helps to speed up the display of the front of the page, reduce parsing locks and provide a smoother user experience. However, you should consider the order of loading dependencies and not complicate the code unnecessarily. For example, JavaScript scripts are loaded in parallel and executed immediately after the download, and are marked async so that the browser does not block HTML parsing because of them.
Conclusion
To sum up, by improving page loading speed, you improve user experience and increase the credibility of the site in the eyes of your users. Accordingly, search engines better index and rank your site and bring it to high positions behind the results of queries of the potential audience. As a result, you attract organic traffic and improve the visibility of your website.