Training

How to Boost the Pagespeed of Your Website

Pagespeed as a Ranking Factor

The pagespeed is the time in seconds that customers on your website need to retrieve content. With a fast or low page speed, visitors have (more) time to view the page they are visiting and call up other pages.

The search engine Google, points out that a fast homepage can bring advantages in the ranking of mobile search results.

This means more visitors for your website. So your company benefits from a website with a fast page speed. This is especially true, if you use your website as a comprehensive marketing and sales tool.

What is the page speed of your website?

Check The Page Speed of Your Website

You can find all kinds of Pagespeed tools online, even from search engines. I use the free tool from Pingdom.com, among others. It supports the call of HTTP/1.1 websites.

To get to know the tool, call Pingdom Pagespeed Test and enter the address of your domain.

The Result Compared to Other Websites

You will now see the results of three sample websites. The individual performance ratings are then explained in more detail.

Probably one of those results is similar to your site.

Example #1 is a website that contains a lot of photos and was constructed in a very resource-hungry way.

The website #2 uses fewer photos, but was still constructed resources hungry.

The third website uses as few resources as possible.

Now to the explanation of the individual performance evaluations. All three websites were tested by a server in Stockholm.

Performance grade

The "Performance Grade" shows the result by using a well known grading systems (A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, F=5). The higher the grade/letter, the more the website can be improved. The best result would be 100, so all websites #1 and #2, as well as #3 still have room for improvement.

Load Time

The "Load time" or loading time of the web pages ranges from 0.523 to 3.25 seconds. A load time of less than 1 second is currently regarded as ideal. The tool from Pingdom has a very fast internet connection. This connection can be much slower for some website visitors.

Faster Than

"Faster than" shows how fast your website is compared to other tested websites. It is a value obtained from all kinds of sites. So it's not clear which industries are involved. The homepages of your industry can be evenly distributed, all of them faster or slower.

Page Size

The "Page size" indicates the total size of the accessed files. A larger data volume may take longer. Website #1, for example, is clearly at the top with 2.9 megabytes in terms of data volume.

Requests

The number of files plays a major role with HTTP/1.1. Each file is transferred individually. Thus, website #1with 73 call requests is far behind website #2 with 46 call requests and website #3 with only 14 call requests.

Increase the Page Speed - Your Options

If you want to improve the pagespeed of your website yourself, you can become active with some know-how. Here you will find a short guide.

Improving Website Pagespeed

To improve your pagespeed, look at the following list from the Pingdom tool after the first part already shown (images above).

Performance insights that have not received a green "A" can be optimized. Press the down arrow in the same row to see more details.

To improve the performance you need at least knowledge about images and design. Under "Requests by content type" of website #2 many files are listed.

1. Make sure that all your links point correctly to the pages and resources ("Avoid bad Requests") For this, see the article about link creation.

2. The images of this example have the largest data volume with 56,6% ("Minimize request size"). Possibly the images can be compressed in size. There are online or graphic tools that do exactly that.

3 Thirdly, it is noticeable that the number of CSS files (13) for the design is high ("Minimize request size"). Large 504,70KB scripts are used. With some technical know-how the files can be combined into one file.

If the result is still not what you had in mind, you may want to redo your homepage design.

Since I have been asked again and again how to make such a design, I have created a Website Design Course. The design is optimized for pagespeed. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, you will get instructions to make a modern and flexible website with little effort.

Conclusion: the Page Speed of Your Website Can be Improved

Both visitors and search engines appreciate a fast page speed. This influences the ranking of your website in the (mobile) online search. For testing, the tool from Pingdom is used. It clearly displays the most important information. Optimize on the basis of the suggestions for improvement.

Autor/in: Iris Mitlacher