A slow website can be the death of your website in terms of SEO. Google hates it. So if you’re serious about SEO then you need to read these 5 ways to speed up your website’s loading time .
5 Ways To Speed Up Your Website’s Loading Time
Speed optimisation is something I carry out as standard when building websites and performing SEO audits for clients so if we’re working together you’re in luck!
If not, check out these tips below.
Check your website’s loading time
I use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check site speeds Google is the main search engine we want to impress so we may as well use one of their tools.
Once you’ve got your report from Google, you’ll have a good idea of how much you need to improve by and what areas need work. Ideally your website should load in under 3 seconds.
Optimise your images
If you’re using Wordpress.org (Using Wordpress.com? Click here.) you can download and install EWWW Image Optimizer or Smush as a plugin on your site to do the hard work for you.
Alternatively, if you’ve got access to Adobe Creative Cloud you can use the option “Save For Web’ to compress your images for faster loading times.
Clean up your scripts and plugins
If you have coding knowledge, this means checking for duplicate tracking codes (often people will include Google tracking codes more than once for different services) and scripts, or condensing them with a tool like Google Tag Manager.
If you’re feeling a little bit lost, a web designer will be able to do this for you.
Install a cache plugin
Cache plugins are great for saving versions of your website page’s and delivering them to visitors with quicker loading times. I like to use LiteSpeed Cache or Hummingbird for this as I find them simple to use with quick results.
Be careful when tinkering with the settings of your cache plugin, and if in doubt stick to the very basic ‘out of the box settings’, as things such as minifying CSS/scripts could result in ‘breaking’ your website design.
If this isn’t enough to speed up your website, I recommend asking a web designer to carry this work out for you.
Of course, there’s plenty of other ways to speed up your website’s loading time, a lot of which will be detailed in your Google report. If you’re looking for a full audit to be carried out on your website’s loading speed, let’s talk about working together.
