How to Improve Website Speed: Six Optimization Strategies

Your site speed is the time it takes for your website to load in a user’s browser. It has a direct impact on user experience, with slow load times lowering their levels of engagement and dropping the chances they’ll convert. In fact, our load time statistics show that, for websites with a load time slower than 5.7 seconds, the conversion rate drops below 0.6%.

On top of this, your website’s speed impacts your site’s SEO and its ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages), so its importance shouldn’t be underestimated!

Site Speed vs. Page Speed

Page speed and site speed are often confused, but they’re very different. Page speed is the speed at which individual pages on your site load. Your site speed is the overall average speed of multiple key pages on your site.

Site speed is a more complex but accurate measure than page speed, which often varies greatly from page to page and so won’t tell the full story of your site’s user experience.

Understanding how to optimize your site speed will help you to improve your user experience, which will have a knock on effect on many areas of your ecommerce store. The key benefits are:

Improving the User Experience

A slow load time is extremely frustrating for visitors trying to navigate your website. When your site loads quickly, users will have a smoother experience and feel more in control, which will encourage them to stay on your site for longer and visit more of your pages. A positive user experience helps build trust on your site.

Increasing Sales

When your customers are at the initial stages of the sales funnel, they’ll go to your site to gather more information on your products or services. Having a slow load time can make it difficult for customers to get past this stage without feeling frustrated.

A slow load time, or any formatting changes during loading, can be enough to persuade customers to drop off – even at the checkout stage. Studies show that, in the first five seconds a user waits for a website to load, conversion rate drops by 4.42% per second.

Boosting SEO

You might be wondering, how does page speed affect SEO? Search engines like Google will push pages that give users a positive experience, so the smoother and faster your site runs, the more likely it is to rank highly. By optimizing your site’s speed along with other areas, such as product page optimization and checkout page optimization, you’ll send positive signals to search engines.

One way to test your website speed is to pay for a full site audit from a company, such as Semrush. But if you’re looking to get an answer at no cost, you can use a free SEO tool to test the speed of multiple individual pages. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great option that covers all the essential metrics in a beginner-friendly layout.

To check the speed of your site’s pages, simply head to PageSpeed Insights and type your URL into the search bar. Then, click “Analyze” to pull up a list of your “Core web vitals,” which are the metrics you’ll need to pay attention to.

Be aware that putting your site’s URL into a page speed tool won’t provide your site speed – just the page speed of your homepage. For example, when I entered Forbes’ homepage to Page Speed Insights, the overall assessment of core web virals failed:

But when I entered the URL of one of Forbes’ latest articles, it gave a very different picture:

When presented with your analytics, you’ll probably be thinking, “I just want to know how to check my website speed, what’s with all the jargon?”

Page speed isn’t as simple as one rounded number. I’ve often thought a website page is fully loaded, only to scroll down and see half of the page is still blank, or that the content has started shifting around the page as new elements appear. Considerations like these are all timed and pulled together in your page speed results.

The good news is that, while each metric has its uses, you don’t have to pay close attention to all of them if you’re looking to improve your SEO and user experience.

Page Speed Metrics

The key page speed metrics you need to understand are:

• Time to first byte (TTFB) – the amount of time it takes for a page to start its loading process. A lengthy TTFB indicates that your server is underperforming.
• First contentful paint (FCP) – the speed at which the first text and image elements appear on the screen. A fast FCP helps to reassure users that something is happening on the page.

• Largest contentful paint (LCP) – how quickly the largest sized text or media elements have loaded. This marks a point where most or all of the page has likely loaded, which gives site visitors confidence to begin navigating the page.

• Cumulative layout shift (CLS) – how much the content on your page moves around during the loading process, presented as a score rather than a speed. The lower the score, the better your users’ experience, since they’re less likely to press the wrong calls to action (CTAs) or lose their place.

Once you’ve got your page speed results, you can make focused website optimizations to improve your scores. Below, I explain six website speed optimization tips to try:

1. Use a Content Distribution Network

When a user visits your website from a location far away from your server, it will take longer for your site to load. A content distribution network, or content delivery network (CDN), is a group of globally interconnected servers that improve your site’s load time by storing your website content on the server closest to your site visitor.

If you run a small site that doesn’t get large volumes of traffic, you’ll be able to get away with a free CDN service – I’d recommend Cloudfare. However, if you experience high-traffic spikes, a paid option, such as Google Cloud CDN or StackPath, will be more reliable.

To switch your server, you’ll need to add your domain to your chosen CDN provider and change its domain nameservers (DNS) to your provider’s DNS. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll need to download your DNS provider’s compatible plugin first.

2. Compress Images

Including images to your site is a great way to engage your customers and increase sales. However, image file sizes mean they take longer to load than text, and when you’ve got multiple large images on one area of your site, such as a product page, the slow load time can end up having the opposite effect and deterring customers from purchasing.

Compressing an image is an image optimization technique, and is the process of reducing an image’s file size so it loads as quickly as possible. 

We recommend using free tools such as ImageResizer to do this. If you’re a WordPress user, plugins like Smush will optimize your images automatically, which will save time for a content-heavy site. Just be aware that the more you compress your images, the lower their quality, and you should preview your images to ensure they’re still clear.

3. Compress Code

Your website’s code may be slowing down its performance without you even knowing it. Minifying, or compressing, your code can hugely improve your website’s load time. There are three types of code you should consider compressing: CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

Remove any unnecessary code from your pages, such as that of features you no longer use, or unnecessary spaces, commas, linebreaks, and semicolons. You can do this manually or using a minifaction tool, such as Gzip.

4. Consider Page Design

Over the past 12 months, a huge 76% of ecommerce traffic came from mobile devices. Unfortunately, websites tend to have slower average load times on mobile devices than on desktops, so it’s more important than ever to make your site mobile friendly, or even consider creating a mobile first design.

Implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (APM) on your store is a great way to reduce your mobile load time. AMP works by stripping down the page’s design for mobile visitors. That said, if you choose a template that’s optimized for mobile, AMP won’t be necessary.

5. Reduce Redirects

A redirect sends a site visitor away from the URL they clicked and towards another one. They are often necessary, especially if you change to a new domain or edit the URL of a page on your site. However, when a user clicks a redirect, servers have to make additional HTTP requests which can slow down your website load speed.

Eliminating unnecessary redirects will help speed your website’s loading time up and improve user experience. Make sure you keep track of the redirects on your website and regularly reassess whether they’re still needed. If a redirect has no inbound links or a low level of traffic, you should aim to delete the redirect and update the content on the original page. You can identify the redirects of each page by using a tool like Redirect Mapper.

6. Keep Testing and Monitoring

It’s important to regularly test and monitor your website’s speed to keep an eye on any sudden changes. This is especially important if you update your site regularly, since you’ll be able to spot and fix any issues quickly.

Website speed optimization may seem like a daunting and time consuming task, but follow my tips and the payoff will be worthwhile. Increasing your website’s loading speed has a snowball effect, boosting your user experience, making them spend more time on your pages, increasing traffic, and driving online sales.