Increase The Speed of Your Website

website speed

How fast is your website? Have you ever wondered how to increase the speed of your website? Google has a tool called Page Speed Insights that measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices.

The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well.

Depending on your score, here are a few performance tweaks that can help.

Enable compression

All modern browsers support and automatically negotiate gzip compression for all HTTP requests. Enabling gzip compression can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%, which can significantly reduce the amount of time to download the resource, reduce data usage for the client, and improve the time to first render of your pages.

Improve server response time

Server response time measures how long it takes to load the necessary HTML to begin rendering the page from your server, subtracting out the network latency between Google and your server.  You should reduce your server response time under 200ms.

Leverage browser caching

Fetching resources over the network is slow. All server responses should specify a caching policy to help the client determine if and when it can reuse a previously fetched response.

Minify resources

Minification refers to the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser – e.g. code comments and formatting, removing unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and so on

Optimize images

Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a page. As a result, optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements.

I realize that some of these recommendations may seem too technical for some, but a quick performance tune-up performed by a competent developer can significantly boost the performance of a website, which can lead to a higher ranking in the search engines.

If you are looking for How to increase the speed of your website, Google Page Insights is  a great reference. If you prefer to let an expert handle it for you, contact us for more information.