Speed is a critical factor in your search engine ranking and can impact how your users interact with your site. No one wants to wait for a page to load. Website speed optimisation helps both of these things, so it's good practice to make sure you're doing everything you can to boost page speed.
The speed of your pages is an SEO ranking factor, and while you might not be officially optimising for search engines, it can't hurt to make sure the most popular sites are the fastest around. It’s pretty straightforward stuff: Google likes customer satisfaction, so it rewards websites that provide a good user experience by ranking them higher in SERPs.
How do you check your page speed?
There are many tools for checking page speed, but I'm going to focus on a free and very easy to use one, Google PageSpeed Insights. This is the most popular tool for testing your site speed, and it's easy to use. Just enter your URL, click "analyse," and then see how you did. Google will give you a score between 1 and 100; the higher this number, the better. The tool will also let you know what scores are considered good, which can be helpful if you're unsure of that.
The most effective way to use Google PageSpeed Insights is to take their recommendations and implement them. They'll tell you what can be improved and how to do it, so you don't even have to research it yourself. Simply read through what they say, then make the recommended changes.
A quick note on the scores: the tool will give you two scores, one for desktop and one for mobile. This is because mobile page speed is increasingly important as more people use their phones and tablets to browse the internet, and page speed is a ranking factor in mobile searches. While it's important to get a good score for both, mobile page speed has been weighted more heavily by Google recently, so it's a good idea to focus on that one first. Unfortunately, it is also the hardest one to improve but the good news is that even with a score below 50 it is still possible to rank on the 1st page.
Optimise your website speed.
Optimise Images.
The number one way to slow down your site is by using large image files. The larger the image file size, the longer it takes for the browser to load it and display it on your site. You can dramatically improve page loading times by compressing images as much as possible without compromising on quality. You can access a lot of free plugins that can help you do this.
Declutter Code.
The other easy way to optimise website speed via code is to declutter it by removing any unused code. This includes comments, line breaks, white space, etc. You can use a number of tools to analyse your website for broken links and any unused codes that could potentially slow down your loading speed.
Remove Plugins.
If you are still using a website that is running on WordPress, it’s important for you to regularly ask your webmaster to check which plugins are active and remove any that are unnecessary or slowing down your site. Keep plugins to a minimum. The fewer plugins you use, the less likely it is that one of them is dragging down your load time. If a plugin isn't absolutely necessary for your site, don't use it.
Conclusion.
The speed at which your website loads is incredibly important. You may have a killer landing page and be pulling in some great organic traffic, but even one extra second of load time can increase your bounce rate by 20%. The best ways to optimise the speed of your website are to choose the right theme and hosting provider from the very beginning (if you can)!