There are many places to go and people to see, and no one has time to sit around waiting for a website page to load. The page speed of a site is a critical piece of a company’s online presence, and a slow site can negatively impact website visitors, search engine rankings, and, ultimately, conversions and revenue.

How can you evaluate your current page speed? Check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of your web page and gives you a score out of 100. Any score less than 90 means your page needs some work.

If you value the quality of your website and its conversions, here are a few best practices to follow to optimize your page speed.

1. Enable Compression

Enabling GZIP, a data compression program, can reduce all of your CSS, HTML and Javascript files so they are downloaded as compressed files, which can significantly improve page load speed.

However, don’t use GZIP on your images, as doing so will decrease their quality. You can optimize your images in a better way below.

2. Decrease Your Image Size

Most people would be surprised to realize that their images have been uploaded at a maximum size that is much bigger than the size their website displays images at. For example, a website could display its images 900 pixels wide; but if the images are being uploaded at 1,500 pixels, then that’s taking up unnecessary space and slowing down your site — especially for mobile users.

You can use an online image re-sizer tool like Resizeimage.net, or, automatically compress your images through WordPress plugins like Imsanity or EWWW Image Optimizer.

3. Audit Your Redirects

If your redirects are redirecting to another redirect…your browser is just as confused as you are reading this sentence. Every time a page redirects to another page, your website visitors are stuck waiting for this process to complete. If you have a page redirecting to a page which redirects to another page, which redirects to the final page,  then those two unnecessary pages in the middle are slowing things down.

Do an audit of your redirects and make sure they are as simplified as possible.

4. Enable Browser Caching

By enabling browser caching, a user’s browser stores or caches elements of the pages they’ve visited. When they visit that site the next time, or browse to another page within that site, the browser can load the page based off of these cached elements, reducing the need for another HTTP request to the server and decreasing load time.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool has some more information on browser caching and how to determine the optimal caching policy for your website.

5. Minify CSS, HTML and Javascript

Optimizing your code can be a simple yet effective way to increase your page speed. Minification refers to the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data (such as spaces, commas, comments, formatting, unused code or extra characters) without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser

Google recommends the following resources to help with minifying your code:

• To minify HTML, try HTMLMinifier
• To minify CSS, try CSSNano and csso.
• To minify JavaScript, try UglifyJS. The Closure Compiler is also very effective. You can create a build process that uses these tools to minify and rename the development files and save them to a production directory.

6. Defer Offscreen Images

Deferring offscreen images basically means that your site delays loading images that aren’t visible to the user yet (ie: below the fold). Combat this by installing a lazy-load WordPress plugin that provides the ability to defer any offscreen images, or switch to a webpage theme that provides that functionality. You can also consider using the AMP plugin, which “enables web experiences that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across distribution platforms”.

6. Invest In Good Hosting

Sometimes you get what you pay for. If you are using shared hosting, your website is in the queue with all of the other sites sharing in the same hosting, essentially competing against each other for speed.

The web hosting you choose is an investment in the success of your website. You need to find a solid web host who is reliable, offers a high-uptime guarantee, and a responsive support time in the event of issues.

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Nearly 70% of consumers say that page speed influences their likeliness to buy, and Google recommends that, on a 3G connection, a landing page load should load within 5 seconds or less.

If you’ve tested your site pages or run them through the Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and aren’t pleased with the results, these two stats alone should make you want to run to your site’s content management tool and get working on the best practices we’ve listed above. Your conversions may depend on it!

Photo Credit: Christian Englmeier on Unsplash