What is the CrUX Dataset?

CrUX is like a real-world report card for websites. It uses data from Chrome users to grade sites in three key areas:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long it takes for the main content to show up. Think of it as how fast you see the headline of an article.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how much content jumps around as a page loads. No one likes unexpected page shifts.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Tests how quickly a site responds to user clicks and taps. A snappy site keeps visitors happy.

June 2024 average scores

The June 2024 numbers show slight but steady gains in all three areas. This means websites, on average, are loading faster, staying stable, and feeling more responsive.

• LCP — 63.4% had good LCP, up by 2%
• CLS — 77.8% had good CLS, up by 0.5%
• INP — 84.1% had good INP, up by 1.1%

Overall, 51% of websites had passing Core Web Vitals scores across all 3 metrics, which is up by 2.3%.

You can check the full results here.

What caused the improvement in core web vitals?

Part of the INP boost comes from changes in how Chrome measures it. Previously, Chrome didn’t always catch pop-ups, which could give some sites unfairly low scores. The new method is more accurate, leading to better results for many.

According to the explanation given by the Google Chrome team:

“The Chrome team has been continuing work on improving efficiencies in Chrome’s handling of the Core Web Vitals metrics and recently launched some changes to INP, which may have contributed to the positive trend this month. The most notable change is to better handle [the] use of the basic modal dialogs (alert, confirm, print). While, technically, these are synchronous and block the main thread—and so are not recommended if there are alternatives—they do present user feedback for an interaction. They were previously not counted as presentation feedback for INP, which could result in very high INP values for sites that did use these. From Chrome 127 the presentation of the modal will mark the end measurement time for INP and so should lead to improved INP times for those sites.”

What does this mean for you?

While the overall picture is brighter, remember these are averages. Some sites are still laggards, while others are speed demons. To keep up:

• Pay attention to your scores: Use tools like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to check your LCP, CLS, and INP.
• Learn from the data: Understand what’s slowing you down. Is it large images, slow server response, or resource-heavy scripts?
• Keep it simple: Often, the fastest sites are the ones without too much clutter. Prioritise essential content and minimise unnecessary elements.
• Test often: Check your site’s speed on different devices (mobile, desktop) and network conditions (slow, fast).

Tips for improving Core Web Vitals (CVW)

If you are struggling with improving core web vitals on your websites, here are a few tips to help you on that front:

• Optimise images: Compress images without sacrificing quality. Use modern formats like WebP for potential savings.
• Reduce server response time: Ensure your hosting provider offers good performance. Consider content delivery networks (CDNs) for faster load times.
• Minimise render-blocking resources: Prioritise loading critical CSS and JavaScript to prevent delays.
• Leverage browser caching: Allow browsers to store static assets locally for quicker repeat visits.
• Prioritise code and reduce plugins: A clean codebase and fewer plugins can improve speed.
• Optimise fonts: Choose web fonts carefully and consider font display options to prevent layout shifts.
• Minimise HTTP requests: Combine files, reduce redirects, and optimise resource delivery.

Going beyond the basics of core web vitals

While these tips provide a solid foundation, achieving exceptional Core Web Vitals often requires a deeper dive. Consider conducting performance audits, using browser developer tools, and analysing user behaviour to identify specific bottlenecks.

Faster websites mean happier visitors. And happy visitors are more likely to stick around, explore, convert, and even come back. So, even if search rankings aren’t your top goal, boosting your website’s speed is a smart move.

Remember, improving Core Web Vitals is an ongoing process. Stay updated with the latest best practices and tools to maintain a high-performing website.

The post Core Web Vitals look up: Fresh data shows improvement appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

The big ranking signals for the page experience include: 

1. LCP or Largest Contentful Paint. LCP refers to the time it takes for the main content on the page to load. Google recommends that LCP should be less than 2.5 seconds.
2. FID or First Input Delay. FID refers to the time it takes for the page to become interactive. Google recommends that FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
3. CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift. CLS refers to the unexpected layout shift of visual content on the page. Google recommends that it should be less than 0.1

Google’s Page Experience algorithm rolled out to mobile searches in 2021. Now, Google has announced that the same ranking signals will be applied to desktop search results from early 2022.

Google also announced that the update for desktop results would be built on the same algorithm that came on mobile search earlier this year.

“This means the same three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS, and their associated thresholds will apply for desktop ranking. Other aspects of page experience signals, such as HTTPS security and absence of intrusive interstitials, will remain the same as well.”

Of course, mobile-friendliness won’t apply to desktop results. 

This means that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile and has separate URLs for desktop and mobile, the desktop version of your website wouldn’t be affected because of the lack of mobile friendliness.

Rollout window

The desktop update is expected to begin in February 2022. Google expects the rollout to be complete by the end of next month, March 2022.

Measurement

To help webmasters measure how their desktop pages are performing in terms of page experience, Google will also introduce a new report in Google Search Console before the desktop page experience update rolls out.

Stay tuned for more information.

The post Google Page Experience Algorithm Update is Coming to Desktop in 2022 appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Many website owners and SEOs jumped on this new method of presenting content, but many just didn’t pay attention. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) have various pros and cons; crucially, they can help you with improved search engine rankings.

If you are not entirely familiar with AMPs, how they work, and their advantages and disadvantages, this blog post will cover all the basics and more. Let’s start from the beginning.

What is AMP?

AMP is a technology — an open source framework — built by Google in collaboration with Twitter. At its core, it strips down a web page to its bare minimum (the content) and, as a result, significantly accelerates the loading of said web page.

Consequently, AMP provides a more seamless, faster, and better experience on mobile devices, and it allows users to quickly jump into a web page, scan its content, and decide whether they want to continue reading or find another source for the information.

AMP is here to stay

Some SEOs and webmasters think that AMP is dying, and Google is not going to support the technology any longer. That is not true; despite its shortcomings, AMP is still preferred by many webmasters and is here to stay.

Google’s Malte Ubl of AMP’s Technical Steering Committee recently reaffirmed Google’s support for AMP with the following statement:

“Google will continue to be a strong supporter of AMP. Google is already a platinum member of the OpenJS Foundation and will continue to provide additional financial and other forms of support to the foundation to ensure a thriving AMP community and ecosystem. The team of Google employees contributing full time to the AMP open-source project will also continue to do so.”

Benefits of AMP

AMP has numerous benefits for a website and its visitors. Here are a few of the big ones:

1. Reduced loading time of the web page

The biggest and most noticeable difference AMP makes is the reduced loading time of the web page. The page is loaded almost instantly, creating a seamless flow of information.
Although there are several other methods to optimise the loading speed of your website, none creates an almost instantaneous effect like AMP does on mobile devices.

2. A cleaner user interface

As mentioned earlier, AMP strips almost all elements of a web page and only keeps intact the content of the page. This leads to a cleaner user interface and an improved user experience — especially for those readers who are primarily interested in acquiring relevant information as quickly as possible.

3. Conservation of resources

AMP also drains fewer resources and is very mobile friendly for users.

Cons of Accelerated Mobile Pages

As we mentioned earlier, there are also some disadvantages to AMPs. Here are a few of them:

1. No ad revenue

If you rely on ad revenue, AMP might not be the best fit for you as it strips down all additional elements on the web page — including ads.

2. Fewer branding opportunities

A web page that is stripped down of its design and additional elements isn’t the best medium to promote your brand. With AMP, you will have significantly fewer opportunities to display your branded colours, design, and other visual elements that people associate with your website and business.

3. Higher bounce rate

As your AMP-powered web page may not have sidebars and additional widgets to redirect users to other pages on your site, you may experience a higher bounce rate than usual.

4. Complications with analytics

Measuring traffic and other metrics is a complicated procedure with Accelerated Mobile Pages. You may miss out on valuable data.

Conclusion

Despite some of the disadvantages, you should at least consider using the AMP technology. The final decision should be made by keeping in mind your specific goals, website, website visitors, and the percentage of mobile users your website gets.

Check out the following guide to get started: Step-by-step guide for implementing AMP on WordPress.

The post What is Accelerated Mobile Pages? appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Slow-loading websites that take forever to load does not provide a good user experience.

To further force website owners, developers, and SEOs to improve the loading speed of their websites, Google Chrome may soon put “a badge of shame” for websites that load slowly in Google Chrome.

According to a blog post by the Google Chrome team, “[In the future], Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow for users with clear badging. This may take a number of forms, and we plan to experiment with different options to determine which provides the most value to our users.”

At the moment, the exact method has not been identified, but Google indicated that it might be in the form of a splash screen.

Take a look at the following example.

Apart from the unmissable badge on the splash screen, Google Chrome may also identify slow- and fast-loading websites with a progress bar on the top.

As you can notice, the blue progress bar just under the URL will indicate a slow-loading website, while a green progress bar will indicate a fast-loading website.

With these techniques, Google wants its users to be aware of websites that might take a few more seconds to load and not offer the best user experience available out there. At the same time, it is also about penalizing slow-loading websites and rewarding websites that load quickly.

According to the announcement blog post, “We think the web can do better and want to help users understand when a site may load slowly, while rewarding sites delivering fast experiences.”

Conclusion

As we mentioned earlier, Google hasn’t yet decided what form it will take. But it is pretty much confirmed that Google is looking into some form of “badging” to differentiate websites on opposite spectrums of user experience and loading speeds.

Google also mentioned in the announcement blog post that its “long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed.”

For website owners, it is another reminder of the importance of a fast-loading website. Use our free guide on website speed optimisation to make sure your site is loading as fast as possible.

The post Google Chrome May Name and Shame Slow-Loading Websites appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

When that happens, it is important to identify the reason so you can take the necessary steps and resolve the problems.

Here are five big reasons why your traffic might drop and what to do about it.

1. Lost backlinks

Backlinks not only help websites gain better rankings in the search engine results pages, but they are also often responsible for driving referral traffic.

If you lose a bunch of important backlinks, your website may lose a lot of valuable traffic, because:

• The referral traffic coming from those backlinks will stop, and
• A drop in the number of backlinks may also result in your website losing search engine rankings. For instance, if your website moved from 1st page to the 2nd page in the SERPs, you are likely to lose a substantial amount of organic traffic.

Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Moz to identify if there has been a drop in backlinks. When it comes to regenerating those backlinks and more, make sure you only target relevant and high-quality backlinks for your website.

2. Changes in search algorithms

Google regularly changes and improves its search engine algorithm. Depending on that update, you may gain or lose some traffic.

In all honesty, there isn’t much you can do to avoid a drop in traffic if it is because of a change in search algorithms. Just continue following Google’s best practices and guidelines, and your site is unlikely to be negatively affected by algorithm updates.

In case your website does get affected by an algorithm update, learn more about the algorithm. An algorithm update usually targets a specific aspect, e.g., the relevancy of backlinks, user experience, content quality, etc.

You can take appropriate steps to resolve those issues once you learn what causes a drop in traffic.

3. Manual penalties

A sudden drop in search engine rankings and traffic may be a result of a manual penalty. Manual actions are not a result of an algorithm update.

Another sign of a manual penalty is that your website will lose traffic from one search engine and will continue to perform well in others.

Your goal should be to get that penalty removed as soon as possible.

Log in to your Google Search Console account and check the notifications. The Manual Actions section will contain all the details you may need in case any of your webpages does not comply with Google’s guidelines. Follow the suggestions mentioned there to fix the problem.

4. Competition from other websites

There are only so many websites that can appear on Google’s first page. It means that if other competitors improve their content and websites, they may overtake you and push you to the next pages.

That will result in a loss of traffic.

When that happens, know that the loss of traffic may not be a result of a manual action or a search engine algorithm. It just means that your competitor(s) outdid you.

Run a detailed analysis of what your competitors are doing, what type of content they are creating, what’s their website loading speed, how is the user experience on their websites, and more.

Then compare those metrics with your website and try to improve on the fronts you are lacking.

5. Website loading speed

The loading speed of a website is although a relatively newer but very important search engine ranking factor.

Over time, websites tend to get slow because of more resources, images, and plugins. If your website becomes too slow, you may lose higher search engine positions and, therefore, a good amount of traffic.

Make sure to keep track of your website’s loading speed of your website over a time to see if it’s slowing down. You can use free tools like Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights for that.

For more information on how to improve the loading speed of your website, read our free guide on speed optimisation.

Conclusion

When you lose rankings and traffic, it is easy to get panic, but that doesn’t solve anything. Instead, take it step-by-step and identify the main reason.

Once you know the reason, you can easily take the appropriate steps to resolve those issues and get your traffic back.

The post 5 big reasons why your traffic might drop (and how to deal with them) appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

A faster loading website has a better conversion rate than a slow-loading website. According to estimates by Google, a one-second delay could lower conversions up to 20%.

This makes a faster-loading website important for business owners. But it’s equally important for Google and its users as well.

One of Google’s main focuses is to provide its users the best possible user experience. This is a big reason why Google wants you to improve the loading speed of your website.

To continue its efforts to facilitate webmasters with improving loading speeds, Google has now released two new tools:

• Speed Scorecard
• Impact Calculator

Both these tools will help website owners improve the loading speed of their websites. Let’s see how.

1. Speed Scorecard

The first new tool by Google, Speed Scorecard, allows you to compare your mobile page speeds with other competitors/websites.

The tool is extremely simple to use.

Just paste your website’s URL as well as the URLs you want to compete against. The Speed Scorecard tool will then list all the websites based on their loading speed.

Note: If you’re on a 3G connection, Google recommends a mobile speed of minimum 5 seconds. On the other hand, Google recommends 3 seconds on 4G connections.

2. Impact Calculator

The second new tool by Google, Impact Calculator, calculates how much potential revenue can be earned with a faster website. The result is based on Google’s estimates.

Furthermore, to use this tool, you will have to manually insert a few important pieces of information, e.g., monthly visitors, avg. value per order, and conversion rate.

After inputting the information, leave the rest to Google’s Impact Calculator.

We believe this tool will be used more for pitching new clients and by SEO experts to convince the upper management that they need to invest in a faster website.

You can access both tools here.

The post Google’s New Speed Testing Tools appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Google recently announced that they had updated Google PageSpeed Insights. Now the Google PageSpeed Insights tool use real-world data from the Google Chrome user experience report. In other words, Google Insights uses metrics from “real-world Google Chrome users who experience popular destinations on the web” and shows you fast your web pages load based on real user data.

The speed of the web pages is graded as per three categories: fast, slow, and average.

• ‘Fast’ represents that the median value of the metric is in the fastest third of all page loads.
• ‘Slow’ represents that the median value of the metric is in the slowest third of all page loads.
• ‘Average’ represents that the median value of the metric is in the middle third of all page loads.

According to Google’s announcement, the Google PageSpeed Insights tool has the following features:

• The Speed score categorises a page as being Fast, Average, or Slow. This is determined by looking at the median value of two metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOM Content Loaded (DCL). If both metrics are in the top one-third of their category, the page is considered fast.
• The Optimisation score categorises a page as being Good, Medium, or Low by estimating its performance headroom. The calculation assumes that a developer wants to keep the same appearance and functionality of the page.
• The Page Load Distributions section presents how this page’s FCP and DCL events are distributed in the data set. These events are categorised as Fast (top third), Average (middle third), and Slow (bottom third) by comparing to all events in the Chrome User Experience Report.
• The Page Stats section describes the round trips required to load the page’s render-blocking resources, the total bytes used by the page, and how it compares to the median number of round trips and bytes used in the dataset. It can indicate if the page might be faster if the developer modifies the appearance and functionality of the page.
• Optimisation Suggestions is a list of best practices that could be applied to this page. If the page is fast, these suggestions are hidden by default, as the page is already in the top third of all pages in the data set.

You can check Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool here. It is also important to remember that not all websites will be graded right away. They require enough traffic and data from the Google Chrome user experience report to be graded.

Happy optimising!

The post Google PageSpeed Insights now use real-world data from Google Chrome appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Welcome to our 7 chapter, 4,000+ word guide to Website Load Speed Optimisation. We believe this is the most comprehensive Website Load Speed Optimisation guide on the ‘net.

Please read through at your leisure, or download the PDF version of this guide here.

Table of Contents:

• Chapter 1: Introduction to Website Load Speed Optimisation
• Chapter 2: What exactly is Page Loading Speed?
• Chapter 3: The Importance of Website Loading Speed
• Chapter 4: The Negative Impacts of a Slow-Loading Website
• Chapter 5: Common Mistakes That Prolong Website Loading Time
• Chapter 6: How to Improve Website Speed for Achieving Better Engagement and Sales
• Chapter 7: Final Words

Chapter 1: Introduction to Website Load Speed Optimisation

Images, video, lead generation forms, nifty little pop-ups, products, and a cool-looking checkout page.

When you think of building a new website, these are often the first things that pop up into your mind.

You start with ideas about the design and branding of the new site.

You think about how best you can arrange your site’s structure and content to best portray the type of business you are.

Unfortunately, most of us miss one extremely important aspect of a successful online business: the loading speed of your website and its individual webpages.

This guide is all about helping you identify the importance of your website loading speed and making it as fast as possible.

Usain Bolt-fast.

But is website loading speed really that important?

Again, not many people understand how important it is, so let us make a big, bold statement right away.

A slow-loading website can — and, in fact, will — kill your business.

That’s how monumental it is.

In this guide, we will discuss:

• What exactly is webpage loading speed?
• The importance of webpage loading speed
• The negative impact of slow-loading webpages (where it hurts)
• A few common mistakes that website owners unintentionally commit that slow down their sites
• And how to improve your website speed so you can get higher engagements and sales.

Let’s start at the top.

(Or should I say the starting blocks…)

And, hopefully, by the end of this guide, you will have complete knowledge and command of how to improve the loading speed of your website and its webpages.

Chapter 2: What Exactly is Page Loading Speed?

Before we start our discussions on how important it is and how to improve the loading speed of your website, we should clarify what it is and what it isn’t, right?

There are many definitions of the webpage loading speed, but here’s the simplest one you need to remember.

Webpage Loading Speed Definition:

“The loading speed of the webpage refers to the time duration it takes to display the entire content of the webpage to the user.”

The time duration is calculated from the time a user clicked on a webpage to the time all the contents of the webpage were displayed.

Chapter 3: The Importance of Website Loading Speed

Now comes the more important topic of our discussion.

Why is the loading speed of your website so important?

Yes, it affects user experience, but how much does it exactly cost you as a business owner? Also, does website loading speed directly affect sales and conversions?

In this segment of our guide, we answer all these questions.

So, here is a simple truth.

If your website loading speed is too slow, people will not wait for it to load. They will not engage with the content you have on your website (despite how good it may be), and they will not buy from you. Search engines will also drop you in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because they don’t want to rank slow-loading websites. In the end, your website will most probably tank because of low sales and revenue.

That’s the gist of it.

We can talk about specifics, too.

For instance, on average, 40% website visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Moreover, approximately 46% will never visit a website again that has poor load speed performance.

So, first impressions become all the more important when it comes to improving the loading speed of your webpages.

The problem with today’s digital world is that nobody likes to wait. Nobody has time. They certainly don’t have enough time to wait for your slow webpage to load. This is the time of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) and Instant Articles that we live in. People just don’t to wait.

Furthermore, according to a recent study, the modern digital world has also shrunk an average human’s attention span. Everything happens so fast that we have forgotten what it means to pay attention or focus. Studies conclude that the average attention span of a human being is just 8 seconds.

In comparison, goldfish has an average attention span of 9 seconds – and our friend Usain can run a 100 metres in 9.58 seconds.

What does it mean when it comes to your website?

It simply means that you can’t make your users wait.

Your website has to be up-and-kicking on all cylinders if it is to make a great first impression. Oh, and in case it fails to do so, 46% of your website visitors will never visit you again.

Starting to get a sense of how important loading speeds can be?

And that was just about first impressions, direct website traffic, and some annoyed non-recurring website visitors. There is much more to it. Let’s briefly discuss all the different negative outcomes of a slow-loading website.

Chapter 4: The Negative Impacts of a Slow-Loading Website (The Consequences)

So what exactly happens when a website doesn’t load in a reasonable time? Your business starts getting effected in multiple ways. For instance:

You Take a Hit in Search Engine Rankings

Google has been absolutely clear on the fact that slow-loading websites will not be ranked on the top positions.

Why?

Well, just like you, Google is also providing a service to its users, and it can’t afford to show poor results to them. Otherwise, people will stop using Google and will instead start using Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, or any other search engine.

Hence, if your website takes forever to load, Google will notice it and eventually demote it in search engine rankings. It will basically replace your website with one of your competitor’s which provides a better user experience to its visitors.

As a result, you will see a drop in search engine traffic.

Google recommends a webpage loading time of under 3 seconds.

Loading Speed Impacts Conversions

As a business website owner, everybody has one major goal: to increase conversions.

We A/B test different text, landing page designs, colours, buttons, and whatnot. However, a simple solution to improve your conversion rate is to just improve the loading speed and performance of your checkout page, which will significantly improve your conversions.

Obama ran a fundraising campaign during the 2011 Presidential Elections. When they managed to improve the conversion rate by 14% just because they reduced the loading speed time from 5 seconds to 2 seconds.

That 14% conversion rate amounted to an additional $34 million. Wow!

Similarly, when Mozilla improved its page loading speed by 2.2 seconds, it managed to increase conversions (downloads) by 15.4%. As a result, it managed to get an additional 10 million downloads per year. Walmart also increased a 2% conversion rate for every 1-second improvement in page loading times.

The web is full of such case studies that prove a direct correlation between loading speeds and conversions.

It Impacts Sales and Revenues

Let’s look at the bottom line.

You would be fine (most of the times) for as long as something isn’t directly affecting your sales and revenues. After all, that’s what business people are most concerned about.

But the fact of the matter is that the website loading speed directly affects sales and revenues.

Once Google experienced a slump because of slow-loading time. It actually saw a 20% drop in traffic just because of a 0.5-second delay in page load times.

Although Google fixed it pretty quickly so it didn’t have any long-lasting impact, most businesses don’t have the same resources or technical expertise Google has. That is why most businesses suffer, sometimes never to recover.

This is especially true for e-commerce businesses and online stores.

Research revealed that 88% of internet users choose online shopping stores with a high-performing website. More importantly, 50% people abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.

If you are one of the victims, where do you think all that traffic goes after they quit your store?

To your competitors, of course.

There’s another catch here.

Nearly 44% people share their bad online shopping experiences with other people, which means that the negative impression you build with a slow-loading website will have negative consequences of exponential nature. You’d build a bad rapport in front of people who never even visited your website. That must hurt!

If you are not sure how much impact the loading speed of your website will have on your conversion rates, use this conversion calculator. You will be shocked by the amount of conversions and money you’re leaving on the table simply because you don’t have a fast-loading website.

So… how do you fix it?

Well, it’s not that difficult to fix this problem and improve the loading speed of your website, but you have to be strategic about it. The following sections of this guide will help you with actionable and practical tips that can start applying right now.

First, let’s take a look at some of the common rookie mistakes most businesses make that prolong their site’s loading time. If you are making any of these mistakes, it’s time to start fixing them.

Chapter 5: Common Mistakes That Prolong Website Loading Time

If you want to reduce the loading time of your website and webpages before they completely load, you have to eliminate decision errors, coding blunders, ignorance, and common mistakes.

When you are building up a website from the ground up, it is much easier to do so. It may be slightly more difficult to do it once you have an established website.

Here are a few common mistakes that may prolong website loading times. Make sure that you are not making any of these rookie mistakes.

1. Inefficient Web Hosting Services

Quite logical, isn’t it?

If you are using an inefficient or mediocre web hosting services to power your website, results aren’t going to be very good.

Website hosting space is often over crowded and fractured. There are, after all, so many websites in the world to power. When people are just starting out with their website, they often resort to choosing the cheapest web hosting plan they can find. That’s not the best way to move forward.

“Cost-effective” web-hosting services have unoptimised servers that run thousands of public sites on a single-server stack. It results in uncontrollable traffic spikes, unexpected downtime, and inefficient delivery of multimedia content or large web files.

Do a bit of research and find the best web hosting services you can find. You will realise that a decent hosting plan won’t break your bank. Additionally, if you want to build a brand, it would be a good idea not to choose a shared hosting plan.

2. Using Too Many Plugins or Widgets

This is a problem that solopreneurs and small businesses face most often.

If you do not have access to a good web developer, you end up using too many plugins or widgets to help you perform the tasks you want to complete.

Who doesn’t like additional features and functionality that are easily accessible from your CMS dashboard?

It all sounds very tempting — perhaps that’s why so many end up installing too many plugins and widgets — but in the end, it negatively impacts your website’s loading speed.

And please don’t underestimate this factor.

You might be thinking, “how much damage can a single Google+ sharing button can do!”

Well, you will be surprised to know that in some instances, that could easily result in a delay of 1-2 seconds.

Only install the bare essentials. Keep add-ons limited, and your website performance won’t be affected too much.

Note: Sometimes, it is not just about the quantity of plugins you have installed. The functionality of plugins also matters a lot. Plugins that query large data streams to perform complex tasks should do this off-server.

3. Too Many Adverts

Selling website real-estate to third-party websites for advertisements is a common way to earn money online. And while it is an extremely tempting to option earn money passively, it can negatively affect the loading speed of your webpages.

It is up to you to calculate whether it is worth it or not. Too many factors play their roles for us to tell you a specific answer.

Yet, know that it is a factor and must be taken into consideration the next time you are defining your advertisement price or determining if you want to sell an additional ad slot to a third-party advertiser. Sometimes, the financial losses that come with high bounce rates and abandon visitors far outweigh the profits you earn from selling advertisng space.

4. Too Many Affliate Codes

The same is true with having too many affiliate codes. Although they are small snippets of codes, they can hog up a lot of valuable memory that eventually slows down most websites.

Nevertheless, affiliate codes cab be important as they are crucial sources of generating money online for some websites. However, it is another point to remember, i.e., not to take affiliate codes lightly as they do affect the loading time of your website.

5. Too Many Pop Ups

Although pop-ups are “in” and a great source of generating new leads, they must be kept to a minimum for multiple reasons:

• Too many pop-ups annoy website visitors and encourage them to quit your website
• They are bad for SEO if done incorrectly. Google doesn’t like them too much.
• Having too many pop-ups on a webpage slows it down considerably.

6. Large Multimedia

Incompatible multimedia, such as super high-quality images and videos with large file sizes greatly affect your webpage’s loading speed.

We understand that having multimedia content on your website is important. No one denies that fact. But you need to make sure that you are only uploading web-friendly versions.

For example, instead of uploading images in a .PNG format, you can upload them in .JPG. That will save a considerable amount of bandwidth and, hence, improve the time it takes to fully load your webpage.

Chapter 6: How to Improve Website Speed for Achieving Better Engagement and Sales

Developing and maintaining a high-speed, high-performing website takes effort, time, and almost supernatural web development skills.

But don’t be disappointed if you don’t have any of those magical powers. There are still ways to achieve a reasonably fast-loading website. In this section, we discuss a few proven ways that can help you make your web pages’ load faster.

1. Start By Testing

Where do you begin?

Whenever you are trying to improve anything, the first step is to always test and record the results. Otherwise, you would never know if you managed to bring any improvements or not.

Additionally, when it comes to improving a website’s performance, initial testing can identify many core areas that need improvement. It basically makes your job a lot easier when you know where to begin.

2. Tools for Testing a Website Performance

Thankfully, there are quite a few tools available that help you identify where your website is lacking. Some of these tools are free; others are paid. My own favorite tools are GTMetrix and Pingdom. You can also use Google’s Page Insight Tool.

Without charging you anything, these tools provide valuable insights into the performance of your website.

For this example, we would be using Pingdom.

Start by visiting the Pingdom tools homepage and enter the URL of your website that you want to improve.

Click the ‘Start Test’ button to allow the tool to work its magic.

Once it’s done, scroll down, and you will see a bunch of items. They will be graded, colour-coded, as well as assigned a score for easy interpretations.

See the following screenshot.

You will find the interface extremely easy to navigate and understand. You can also click on the drop-down menu on the right side of each item to explore further information and the exact solution you need.

Scroll down for even more information about your website.

One excellent way to understand — without the help of a web developer — is by understanding the waterfall chart. It tells you exactly what takes the most time to load on your website.

If you scroll down even further, you will see a legend that shows different colours that highlight the different stages of a request.

All this free information can help you pinpoint the exact spots that need the most attention.

Other than that, following are a few proven tips and tricks that would help most websites improve their performance. These tips apply to all websites and are especially helpful for you if you are just starting out a new website.

4. Use Optimised Images

We use more images on our websites that we initially expect to use. Soon, they become too big for the website to continue performing fast.

Image optimisation is one of those points that you always need to remember — from the very first day of launching your website.

• Use the right format for the images you upload on your website. PNGs should be avoided unless you are using them for logos, icons, or illustrations. Avoid BMPs or TIFFs. Use .JPGs as much as possible.
• Resize images based on the height and width of your website template. It saves valuable bytes per image.
• Compress images without compromising on quality too much. You will see that you can easily compress a .JPG image by 50-60% without losing too much quality.

5. Optimised CSS Code & Delivery

Ensuring a speed-optimised CSS delivery is essential if you want to maintain a fast-performing website. Use the following tips:

• Use fewer declarations and operators to cut down the size of your code.
• Minify CSS as much as possible.
• Load CSS code inside the <head> tag.
• Use only one external CSS sheet.
• Don’t forget to remove unused CSS.
• Avoid using CSS in HTML

6. Minify JavaScript, CSS, HTML

Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to make sure that all the code on your website is optimised for faster delivery. Minifying inline JavaScript and external files are extremely important. As per Google’s recommendations, you should minify all JS files that exceed 4096 bytes of size and shave off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference towards the loading time of the web page.

Also, the goal should be to combine multiple server requests for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into singles ones effectively. This little technique would significantly minimise the loading time of any webpage.

7. Avoid Using Too Many Plugins

As we have discussed in the previous section of this guide, avoid using too many plugins.

Although as tempting the additional functionality could be, using too many plugins significantly slow down a website.

Moreover, it is not just about the total number of plugins you use. More often than not, the functionality — and the complexity — of a plugin has a bigger impact.

To keep things simple for you, any plugin that performs complex operations, perform requests to external APIs, increases the number of database queries, or loads a lot of content assets and scripts should be a big NO!

8. Cleaning WordPress Databases

You may have noticed it that the WordPress content management system (CMS) stores posts, pages, comments, etc. within a single database. It also contains forms of textual and encrypted data. On the other hand, it stores all images and videos in a separate “wp_content” folder.

That single database gets very crowded over time. From comments in the spam queue, post revisions, unapproved comments, and trashed items such as web pages and deleted blog posts, can turn out to be a big pile of garbage that slows down your website.

Make sure to clean your WP database and keep it optimised.

9. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Content delivery networks or CDNs are designed to supercharge the performance of any website. These CDNs are particularly helpful for a website that receives traffic from multiple countries and continents.

In simple words, CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copied of web pages. Online users — when they request your web pages and the information contained in them — are directed to the nearest server based on their geographical location (the country and continent they are making this request from).

10. Upgrade Your Hosting Plan

As you must know, there are multiple web hosting plans/packages to choose from. Over time, you will have to upgrade your website hosting plan. Otherwise, your website will continue suffering from slow load times.

Website hosting plans can generally be divided into three major categories:

• Free
• Shared
• Dedicated or managed hosting

As you can guess, no business owner should opt for free hosting. It is primarily used by hobbyists.

Shared hosting is one of the most popular forms of web hosting plans. They are extremely popular among individuals who are just getting their feet wet in the online business and e-commerce world. If you are just starting out — and not 100% sure about your online business and its future — it’s a good plan to start with.

Dedicated or managed hosting, on the other hand, is for more serious contenders. They would have an established brand or business that is continuously growing. At the same time, it is also perfect for mid-sized businesses or solopreneurs who are extremely serious and confident in their online business.

11. Configure your server and .htaccess file

You can configure server files like htaccess and active leverage browser caching, Gzip compression, Enable Keep-Alive.

Here are the codes that can be used in htaccess file to activate above mentioned for WordPress and HTML websites.

Please note that this is an advanced tactic, and if done incorrectly can cause major issues to your website. Please get your web-developer to research the following in detail before implementing and test the code on a development server.

##Start Here##

## Enable for Connection alive##

Header set Connection keep-alive

## Disable ETags##

FileETag none

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

<IfModulemod_expires.c>

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/pdf “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresDefault “access plus 2 days”

</IfModule>

<IfModulemod_deflate.c>

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Header append Vary User-Agent

</IfModule>

Chapter 7: Final Words

You have made it. Finally. Congratulations!

After 4,000+ words, you now know pretty much everything important about website loading speed that you should know.

The loading speed of a website has always been important, but in the last few years, it has become a serious factor. It can, in fact, be the difference between a good website and a GREAT website! Don’t take it lightly.

Moreover, in the next few years, its importance is only going to grow. So it would pay heavily if you invest in it right now, so you can reap the wonderful rewards later in the form of higher search engine rankings, a much better conversion rate, a great user-experience and impression on website visitors, and higher sales and revenues.

The post Usain Bolt’s Guide to Website Load Speed Optimisation* appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.