Optimizing Loading Speed: An Essential Element In SEO
When a site page takes a long time to load, it disrupts the user’s navigation, who may prefer to go elsewhere to find the information he needs. Moreover, the speed of a website, including mobile, is something that Google deems very important, and it will penalize you in your SEO if the speed of your site is not optimal. This article will discover why and how to optimize loading speed of your website to ensure the best possible SEO and an SEO-friendly site. “
Why is it necessary to increase the speed of loading pages?
From an SEO point of view
On the one hand, the loading speed of a website is one of the SEO factors for Google robots, the more your site performs, the more it will have a positive impact on your SEO. When voice commands represent 1⁄3 of web searches, we no longer even take the time to type our searches. Search engines, therefore, need to have the most instantaneous response possible. It is estimated that a site with a standard load time can load a page in a time between 300 ms and 500 ms. The number of searches on mobile continues to grow, as mobiles do not have the same power as a computer, it is necessary to optimize the loading times of web pages.
From a user’s point of view
On the other hand, it is very frustrating for a user to browse a website with difficulty loading. It is estimated that a user will never wait more than 3 seconds.
In reality, if it takes more than 600ms, the loading time is too long. He will prefer to close the tab and get the information somewhere else.
How to diagnose your website?
Before wanting to improve the loading time of your website, you must, of course, carry out an inventory of your website.
Mohd Shahrukh has selected three tools that can allow you to analyze the loading speed of a page. The result will determine if your site needs further optimization or if it is fast enough. For a more in-depth analysis, I invite you to consult this article.
There are several tools available on the internet for this. The first tool to use is the one offered by Google itself.
Google Pagespeed Insights
This tool is straightforward to use and can estimate the loading time on your site’s desktop and mobile versions. Please note, the results are different depending on the medium. A site can be very well optimized on desktop and be slow on mobile.
You have to paste the URL of the page you want to analyze in the dedicated space. In less than a minute, you will get a detailed report of the areas for improvement on your page. Google will also give you a score between 1 and 100; if your site scores between 90 and 100, it is considered a good score, and the website is effective. Now it’s up to you to analyze Google’s report and make the necessary decisions to maximize your chances of being well-positioned.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix works in the same way as the tool offered by Google. You paste the URL of the page to be tested, and the tool takes care of giving it a rating and a diagnosis in a few seconds.
GTmetrix, on the other hand, is more visual and more intuitive for users than Google Pagespeed Insight. In addition, the actions to be performed to optimize the loading time of your page are ranked in order of priority. GTmetrix provides a more complete and in-depth analysis to help you target optimization opportunities regarding the technical aspects to improve.
Pingdom Tools
Then the use of Pingdom Tools will complete your expertise.
This software is generally used for the same thing, but it is interesting to compare the results between the two tests.
Pingdom Tool will present you with four main criteria:
- The weight of the pages
- Loading time
- The number of requests when the page loads
- A performance index
Like the Google tool, Pingdom Tool offers you areas for improvement for your website; it also gives you the response codes.
Although very similar, these three tools allow you to get different points of view on your website. It is then up to you to correlate the results and choose the best areas for improvement.
Now that we know what state your website is in, we will give you a list of tips to optimize the loading time of your website.
My advice is to speed up the loading time of your web pages
On your server-side
Choose a successful web host.
There are a lot of web hosts on the market and at all prices. There are two types of servers: dedicated and shared.
Shared servers are, in principle, less efficient. As its name suggests, the servers are shared by several sites, which can slow down your performance if too many connections are made to the other sites of the server. I prefer a server dedicated only to your site.
Use a CDN (content delivery network)
A CDN is a content linking system. Computers are networked across the internet and act as mirrors to reflect the content of a site deposited on a server to improve the performance of the content transmission/delivery mechanism.
This translates into reduced bandwidth costs as well as improved user experience.
Use DNS preload
The DNS is what helps bring traffic to a domain name. It is he who translates your search “www.keyweo.com” into computer language that allows all computers to be interconnected and understand each other. It will make sure that you connect to such a domain name and make the link with the server on which it is hosted.
It is possible to preload the DNS (keeping it in cache for a predefined period) so that the response to the request is faster.
Use external storage platforms so as not to overload the server
To optimize the loading of your pages, we advise you to host rich content on storage platforms independent of your website.
For example, if you want to present video content, prefer to put this content on platforms like Youtube, etc.
And integrate the link into your page, the video being hosted on servers external to yours; this will lighten the weight of your page.
On the side of your website
Limit the use of Widget and Plugin
It is true that Widgets are elegant and make a site more attractive. However, they also regularly take a long time to load due to their weight. Focus only on the essential Widgets.
Minimize the set of files (we give you tools for this further down in the article)
The lighter the content of your site, the faster your page will load. Therefore, it is essential to reduce the load of all the files on your website as much as possible.
Minimize HTML / CSS code
To display a web page to you, the browser needs to read the code version of your page to display it correctly afterward.
The shorter the code to decipher by the browser, the faster the response will be
Minimize HTTP requests and prioritize your content
Each line of code that needs to be read will increase your page load time. However, it is not necessarily beneficial to load the whole of your page if the user only uses part of it.
For example, it is not interesting to load a drop-down menu until the user has clicked on it.
There are different plugins to handle this, depending on the software you are using.
This is called “lazy loading”, you have to type this followed by the software you are using to find these plugins on the net.
Minimize javascript and CSS content
Some resources can take a long time to load because the browser will need to download them while the page is loading, which can take a long time.
Eliminate these resources, which may take too long to download.
Consider using water lines to prioritize your content.
Here are various tools that can help you improve your loading speed.
are many tools to reduce the size of the files on your web pages. Here we will present you six tools that will allow you to improve the loading time of your pages as much as possible. Three of these tools have the explicit goal of accelerating this latency time. The other three aim to reduce the weight of the photos as much as possible. We noticed that many of our customers had already seen this kind of problem on their site but did not know how to fix it.
Three tools to speed up a site
Using these tools requires good computer skills, we advise you to contact an SEO agency to achieve this kind of improvement. Do not try anything if you feel you do not have the necessary capabilities; it may damage the functioning of your website.
Gzip
This program compresses files before their transit on the web; then, the browser will decompress them when displaying the page. Compressing files increases the performance of your site as well as saves bandwidth.
All browsers recognize gzip.
Find the link to access the Gzip program here.
web.dev
Proposed by Google, this tool is designed for web developers; it is used to train and study its site as a case study. The advantage of this tool, unlike “Google Pagespeed Insights “, is that it offers you articles to improve the points that are problematic on your site. web.dev will detail the analysis in 4 parts: 1 Performance; 2 Accessibility; 3 Best practices; 4 SEO
We advise you to visit this page several times a year and make sure you stay in the green. Due to updates to the Google algorithm that may impact your results.
Find the link to access Google web.dev here.
WP rocket
WP rocket allows you to apply file compression using Gzip and improve the speed of a WordPress site. It serves precisely the same benefits as Gzip and mentioned earlier.
To be able to use WP rocket, you must ensure two conditions:
- The server on which your site is hosted must have the gzencode function available in PHP.
- mod_deflate must be enabled on the server. Contact your host if you don’t know the answer.
- The necessary rules are placed in the configuration file of your .htaccess server, located at the root of your site.
Find the link to access WP rocket here.
Three tools to optimize your photos
A large majority of people detect this problem when they audit a site’s SEO performance. In most cases, unfortunately, they don’t know how to fix it. In addition, optimizing images by compressing them is usually associated with loss of quality. However, free online tools can significantly reduce the weight of pictures without being noticeable to the naked eye.
In this article, we will compare three free image optimization tools and compare their effectiveness. To establish this comparative test, we will use the following image. Its original weight is 499 KB, and its size is 1920 x 1268 px.
| TinyPNG | Squoosh | Compressor.io | |
| UX / UI | Fast and intuitive | Very visual. Possibility of having a before-after | Very visual. Possibility of having a before-after |
| Formats accepted | JPG / PNG | JPG / PNG / Mozjpg / WebP | JPG / PNG / GIF / SVG |
| Download files | Up to 20 files at the same time | One by one | One by one |
| Maximum weight | 5MB | Up to 10MB
-Accepts heavier but the page hangs- |
10MB |
| Registration | On your computer
On Dropbox |
On your computer | On your computer
On Dropbox |
| Choice of quality | Impossible | Possible | Impossible |
| Need to login | Yes | No | Yes |
| Change size | Impossible | Possible | Impossible |
| Developer | API | Stephane.Ly | |
| Size affected? | No | No | No |
| Optimization | 57% | 56% | 39% |
| Final weight | 178.3 KB | 184KB | 253 KB |
| Quality | The quality of the photo will not be affected by the transformation. On the other hand, its weight occupies less than half of what it occupied before the compression. It can be seen that the texture of the flamingo’s plumage is unchanged and still contains so much detail. The colours were also not transformed during optimization. We can conclude that TinyPNG does not interfere with the quality of the photos, the changes made being imperceptible to the naked eye. | With Squoosh, we see that the details in the texture of the plumage are less visible than in the original photo. The head and the beak, on the other hand, retain much of the same quality. The colours are also the same after transformation. The advantage of this tool is that it allows us to vary the reduction in the weight of the image. | Compressor.io is the tool that best preserves the quality of the original image. It can hardly perceive the changes. The photo is highly similar to the original. It preserves all the details and texture of the flamingo’s plumage. |
Conclusion
Each tool was able to reduce the weight of the original image significantly. TinyPNG and Squoosh, in particular, achieved more than 55% optimization and Compressor.io meanwhile a little less, 39%. All the images have retained their quality and colors, and although Compressor stands out on this point, Squoosh also performs well. We have also seen that the texture of the image is better than in the TinyPNG version.
Optimizing your images is one of the significant aspects of good SEO practices and the development of content adapted to search engine referencing criteria. Although reduced, the images can improve the loading time and thus satisfy both Internet users and Google.
Optimizing loading times is just one of the many points to take into account for good SEO. For more advice, feel free to check out the other SEO articles on my blog.
