Page speed - How to speed up loading?

The rocketing loading speed will help the web to rise in the search engines. How to shorten the page load time and get higher in search engines?

Google prioritizes speed- and data-optimized pages in search results. From the SEO point of view, the speed of web loading has a similar impact as the quality of content and is therefore important for both users and robots. The impact on the visitors themselves is obvious - a slow website nowadays most people. It is necessary to think of different speed networks. For example, a Web that loads relatively quickly on wifi or 4G / LTE may break negative records on the Edge network in the subway. People then prefer to leave the site. Despite the fact that today many mobile phone users still connect with a limited amount of data. Therefore, downloading large files is not desirable for them in this regard either. Search engine robots, in turn, are allocated a kind of memory budget per page. When downloading large amounts of data that could be better optimized, these algorithms consider this a negative symptom. As a result, the site lags behind in search results.

You can test the speed of your site on different connections on Google Chrome by watching a video on YouTube. And if you find that something is slowing down your website unnecessarily, try our 7 recommendations on how to improve your SEO thanks to the speed of the website.

1) Optimize image size

Make sure that the images on your site are not unnecessarily large, but their actual size is approximately the same as the displayable one. Therefore, you should not shrink them directly in the code, but save the shrunken ones to the server. For example, if you want a 900x500 pixel image on the web, it's not a good idea to upload a 4096x4096 pixel digital camera photo. Think mobile phone users with a limited data package. They don't thank you for downloading an 8 MB photo. The specific size cannot be generalized, but should not exceed 100 kb, although this can be unnecessarily much in some cases.

2) Avoid multiple redirects from the landing page

The redirection process sometimes resembles a postal tale about delivering a letter to an addressee who no longer lives in the house. The new resident will only tell you the address where he moved. When it repeats itself in that situation, it starts to bother you a little. Another redirect, another delay.

To save similar processes to your site visitors, pay attention to site modifications. For example, if you replace the original url / kosik with a new page / kosik1 when changing the e-shop, the user will hardly know it and the search engine has no problem with that. A snag can occur the moment you create an even newer page / kosik2. Redirection along the route / kosik => / kosik1 => / kosik2 already causes a certain delay, which is recorded by both the visitor and the robot. It can even penalize you for an unnecessary extra step, so you may have to clear positions in search results. The optimal route to the final address should therefore always lead directly.

3) Reduce the response time on the server

The response time is the time during which the server sends the necessary data to display the page. Unfortunately, there is no precise guide to shorten this time, as it can be affected by too many factors. However, Google's PageSpeed Tools provides helpful information on tracking and measuring the processes that your server spends the most time on. Values should be around 200 ms. If they are higher, the response time needs to be shortened.

4) Eliminate rendering blocking resources

You can find the content of the page above the margin in the source code in the header terminated by the notation / head. Some styles connected via a link or javascripts loaded by default can be another unnecessary source of web slowdowns. These can be, for example, animations that take a long time to load when entering the page, even though they are not yet important to the visitor at that time. Such blocking resources should be set aside by the developer until the user actually uses them. Another option is to load resources asynchronously or paste critical parts of them directly into the HTML code that begins under the header.

5) Shorten HTML, CSS and Javascript

Minifying HTML, including all embedded Javascript and CSS, can save a lot of data and speed up downloads. This removes extra spaces and other "whitespace" from the code, or shortens too long function entries. It is also recommended to merge several identical or similar css files into one and not use unnecessarily large Javascript libraries, which the web will not use as well.

6) Activate compression

Any source files that are downloaded to the computer when the pages load to be viewed by the user slow down the whole process. These are, for example, images, css or javascript files. You can reduce the amount of data sent over the network by compressing these sources. Gzip or Deflate tools will help you with that.

7) Take advantage of browser caching

Extending the expiration date or maximum age in the HTTP headers of static resources instructs the browser to load already downloaded resources from the local disk, not over the network. Ask your developer for settings using an .htacess file.