10 PageSpeed Factors You Must Consider For Your Website
Whether you run a blog or an e-commerce website, whatever it may be, your main target will be to grab the attention of your valuable visitors and search crawlers. For this, you have to optimize your web page in such a way that it drives the targeted traffic to your website. Most professionals tend to forget the most important component in SEO, which is nothing but PageSpeed or page load time.
Your site speed and page load time plays a vital role in Google’s ranking algorithm. With a view to make your content more attractive, you might have integrated plenty of graphics and images in your website. But, this actually slows down the overall PageSpeed of your website. Of course, I agree with you that developing high quality content is more important, but still, to have a competitive advantage and to provide an enhanced user experience, you must definitely consider the following 10 PageSpeed factors to refine your website in a more powerful way.
1. Combine images using CSS sprites:
By combining images using CSS sprites, you can reduce the amount of image requests as it enables you to compress plenty of pictures in one image. This method can be applied to sidebar, header, footer, background, and static advert icons or photos.
2. Leverage Browser Caching:
Generally, caching enables browser to save those resources, which are sent by the web servers locally. With the help of browser caching, you can spend less time to look for same information as your PC is already loaded with cached versions of the pages. Moreover, it enhances your page load speed and helps you in managing the overall bandwidth requirements.
3. Minify CSS and JavaScript:
By compressing the size of your JavaScript and CSS files, you can increase the speed of page loads on your website. JavaScript and CSS compression tools allow you to clean up the unnecessary portions of your code. These tools modify your files before you actually upload them onto your server. This in turn decreases the size of the file, thereby allowing increased page load speed.
4. Image Optimization:
There are several advanced tools to reduce the size of your image files without affecting their visual quality. These tools remove the unnecessary bytes from your image file and take complete care of your picture’s quality.
5. Minimize Redirects:
Yet another possible way to increase the page loading speed of your website is to minimize HTTP redirects from one URL to another URL. Ensure that you always avoid 301 redirects, which increases your page loading times.
6. Serve Scaled Images:
Avoid using large images in HTML. Instead, you can use a web-based image editor to resize your images to the required dimensions. This helps in reducing the size of the image file, thereby decreasing page load times.
7. Inline Small CSS and JavaScript:
Inlining Small CSS and Small JavaScript files into the main HTML page cuts down the page loading times as it minimizes RTTs and possible delays in downloading other resources.
8. Avoid CSS @ Import:
Normally, CSS files are loaded first and @import style-sheets are loaded at last. This slows down the rendering of the page. Hence, it is always advised to avoid CSS @ import files for faster PageSpeed.
9. Enable Compression:
When a visitor requests for a page on your site, several text files including HTML, JavaScript, CSS pages, and more are delivered to the visitor’s browser. By compressing these files, you can gradually reduce the time required for the server to deliver them.
10. Enable Keep-Alive:
Usually, it takes time to open a connection between the visitor’s browser and web server, over the Internet. When this connection has to be opened several times, it naturally increases the page loading time. Enabling Keep-Alive permits HTTP sessions to handle multiple requests over a single TCP connection.
These 10 factors for augmenting the PageSpeed of your website should be a sure-shot remedy for retaining your treasured visitors and making the search engine spiders happy!! Now that are you are almost there on the right way to a much faster website with enhanced PageSpeed. Implementing the above listed techniques will definitely help you experience a dramatic improvement in your site’s performance and enjoy the benefits of a never before traffic with a higher search engine ranking.
