Do people notice when your website is slow? Yes! And it’s not only your visitors that notice — search engines notice too. Slow websites affect the metrics that matter most to your business such as sales, conversion rates, and traffic. Think about it. Especially on a mobile device, how many times have you exited a page because the website didn’t load fast enough? You probably blamed the slow speed on a poor network connection, but in reality, it could’ve easily been that the website’s performance just wasn’t optimized properly.

If your website is too slow, search engines know this and essentially punish the website with lower search rankings. People like things to happen fast, and search engines like Google reward websites that load fast because they want to give users the most optimal experiences. One of the easiest ways to increase the speed of your website is to reduce the load size of each page. It’s a best practice that is well-documented in many search engines’ documentation.

For example, Facebook has algorithms that prioritize faster-loading mobile websites and show them more often than slow-loading sites. This means that as a direct consequence of slow speed, your website’s content may not be viewed as frequently as it should. Imagine all that lost opportunity.

How fast should a page load? According to Hubspot, a best practice is to have a webpage become interactive within 3 seconds. Google has a great tool Page Speed Insights to grade the speed of any webpage, and it’ll give you specific suggestions on how to improve a webpage’s load speed.

So how can you make your website faster?

Minify Your Code

Minification is the reduction in the size of the source code of your site. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to code, but it’s helpful to understand how certain things work behind the scenes. 

Super Crash Course on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

A browser renders the languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the images and text you see on your screen. 

Think of HTML as the skeleton of your website. Each element has a ‘tag’ that lets your browser know the type of element it is such as a heading (<h1>) or image (<img>). Now you need to dress up your skeleton to give it meat and make it pretty, and this is what CSS does. CSS creates backgrounds, bolds text, and designs the layout. Javascript gives your dressed-up skeleton action. It makes your website dynamic and interactive. Learning HTML and CSS basics can be useful and a great free resource to learn is the nonprofit FreeCodeCamp.

If you look at the image below, the source code looks like a cat took a nap on your keyboard.

Although spacing out this code is helpful for human readers, computers do not care how much space is between each line. There are various options to minify the source code of your website, and this job will most likely go to your web developer. But if you created your own website, it’s important to understand what minification is and how this can improve your site’s performance and SEO. WordPress has tons of plugins to help with this and there is other software available to minify your code.

Compress Your Files

Compression is pretty much exactly as it sounds. It’s the process of making large files smaller, and smaller file sizes mean your website runs faster. If you’ve ever tried watching a YouTube video on a slow network connection, you’ll notice that the quality is lower because YouTube is sending your computer smaller files (low quality)  to accommodate for the slow internet connection. If it were to send you the larger files (high quality), the video has a higher likelihood of buffering because larger files take time and bandwidth to load.

Compressing images and videos is pretty straightforward. It can be done in the rendering process or by using software. TinyPNG is an awesome web app to decompress your images before uploading them to your site. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping from your desktop to their website, downloading the compressed version, and then uploading them to your site. There are also various plugins on any CMS that will do this as well.

The behind the scenes of how compression works sounds a bit complicated, but essentially, the files are being reformatted to reduce repetitive code and lighten the load of the file so that it can be decompressed later on. You may have opened a zip file, and this is what happens when you decompress. To further reduce file sizes you can minify your files first and then compress them.

Use CDNs for Fonts

Is your site using fonts that are optimized for speed? How can a font slow your loading speed? If a visitor does not have a font on their computer, the browser has to take extra steps to download the font before rendering it. A simple solution to this is to use a CDN like Google Fonts.

A CDN is a link to an online source code, and Google Fonts is a great resource for reliable, optimized fonts. They also tell you what other fonts in their library work well with the font you choose. The best part is that the fonts are free and they have a large collection to suit pretty much any need.

Web performance should not be an afterthought. Test your pages regularly with Google’s tools and optimize your webpages. Talk to your developer about minifying your pages, compressing files, and using CDNs. There are various factors that determine the SEO of a website, and improving your website performance is a great first step to improving SEO.