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Improving Pagespeed: Best Practices for a faster Website

Fast loading times lead to more conversions and more sales in e-commerce. Find out how you can optimize your pagespeed.

E-commerce websites with a load time of one second typically see conversion rates of 3.05%, compared to just 1.08% at five seconds of load time. In an era where quick load times are essential for satisfied users, optimizing page speed should be at the top of the priority list.

In this article, you’ll learn how to accelerate your website’s performance through best practices. We’ll focus on concrete solutions and measures, such as:

  • Optimizing hosting and server configuration
  • Improving file and media usage
  • Applying web optimization and code minimization
  • The essential aspects of page speed

The load speed of a webpage plays a crucial role in visitor satisfaction and the success of e-commerce sites. Especially with short load times, conversion rates increase and bounce rates decrease. Conversely, long load times hinder consumers’ buying decisions. To quantify this, here are some facts:

  • Conversion rates triple with a load time of one second compared to slower pages.
  • 82% of consumers say that slow page load times affect their purchase decision.
  • With a one-second load time, the average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is 3.05%.
  • In contrast, the average conversion rate drops to 1.08% with a five-second load time.
  • The number of sales per 1,000 visitors decreases from 30.5 at one second of load time to 10.8 at five seconds.

These data highlight the importance of fast load speed for the success of your online business. Therefore, continuously optimize your website to provide users with the best possible experience.

Page Speed Optimization and its Impact on Ranking

Page speed is a crucial ranking factor, especially for mobile search results. Fast load speed directly affects search engine rankings, making websites more easily found by users. Therefore, it’s essential for website operators to continually optimize and check the speed of their pages.

Measuring and Analyzing Website Load Times

Various tools and methods are available for measuring and analyzing load times. Besides well-known applications like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix, there are other solutions for evaluating page load time, duration, and the speed of your website. The data obtained serves as a basis for improving page speed and user experience. Regular checks help identify and fix problems early on.

Optimizing Hosting and Server Configuration

To enhance website performance, optimizing the hosting and server configuration is crucial. It affects the transmission speed between the server and browser and the processing of requests and responses.

Choosing a Powerful Web Host

Choosing a suitable web host is vital for your website’s performance. Consider the following criteria when making your decision:

  • Availability: High availability, often expressed as uptime in percentage, ensures your website is continuously accessible.
  • Server Speed: Fast servers can process requests quickly and reduce your website’s load time.
  • Scalability: Look for the ability to quickly and easily adjust resources like storage space or performance as requirements grow.
  • Geographical Proximity: The physical distance between the server and website visitors affects load time. Choose a web host with servers in your target region.
  • Customer Support: Competent and accessible support is indispensable for resolving issues.

Setting Up a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of distributed servers that store and locally deliver your web content in various geographic regions. This improves load times for visitors worldwide. A CDN offers several benefits:

  • Reduced Latency: Distributing content across multiple server locations shortens the distance to the website visitor, increasing transmission speed.
  • Load Distribution: During high traffic, the CDN can distribute requests, reducing the load on individual servers.
  • Automatic Optimization: Many CDNs offer additional features like image optimization, compression, and security features.

Implementing Compression and Caching Techniques

Compression and caching techniques make data transmission between server and browser more efficient, thus improving your website’s load time. The following measures can help:

  • HTTP Compression: Using compression algorithms like gzip or brotli reduces file sizes before transmission and then unpacks them in the browser.
  • Server-Side Caching: Server-side caching stores frequently requested content in server memory, delivering it directly to the browser without reprocessing each request.
  • Browser Caching: Browser caching stores static files (e.g., images, CSS, JavaScript) in the browser’s cache, so they don’t need to be fetched and loaded with every page visit.
  • HTTP/2: Using HTTP/2, the current version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, allows more efficient data transmission by processing multiple requests in parallel within a connection.

Optimizing Page Speed: Improving File and Media Usage

Since elements like images, graphics, and scripts make up the majority of your website’s load time, we aim to show you how to increase the efficiency of these components. Achieving a good balance between appealing design and fast load time is essential.

Image Optimization and Compression

Image files often significantly contribute to a webpage’s load time, especially with high-resolution images. To enhance your website’s performance, you should optimize and compress all images. Here are some steps you can follow:

  • Use compact image formats like JPEG, PNG, or WebP.
  • Reduce image file sizes with compression tools without visibly compromising quality.
  • Scale images to their actual display size.
  • For multiple small images within an article, use the “Lazy Loading” format to reduce load time.
  • Set a width and height for image HTML elements to stabilize the layout during loading.

Using Sprites for Icons and Graphics

To decrease the number of HTTP requests and thus the load time, you should use so-called sprites for icons and graphics. Sprites combine multiple graphics or icons into a single image file. Instead of requesting many small files individually, the entire sprite is loaded as one file, speeding up the loading process.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Combine similar icons and graphics into a single image file using a sprite generator.
  • Apply CSS techniques to display each area of the sprite appropriately on your website.
  • Ensure to optimize and compress the sprite image files as described in the previous section.

Reducing Unnecessary Files and Optimizing Scripts

An excess of files, especially scripts and stylesheets, can significantly impair your website’s performance. Therefore, it’s important to remove unnecessary files and optimize the remaining ones. To achieve this, consider the following approaches:

  • Check which scripts and stylesheets are actually used on your page and remove those that are not needed.
  • Minimize scripts and stylesheets to reduce their file size.
  • Combine multiple scripts and stylesheets into single files to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

  • Load scripts and stylesheets asynchronously or defer them to avoid render-blocking.

Enhancing Page Speed Through Web Optimization and Code Minimization

To further increase your website’s performance, optimizing the code is essential. Besides minimizing file sizes, efficient management of tracking scripts plays a significant role and can have the most significant effect on page load time. Here, server-side tracking comes into play, often considered the most effective measure for performance optimization.

Server-Side Tracking as a Page Speed Booster

Every third-party JavaScript executed via a tag manager can be shifted to server-side tracking, meaning the scripts no longer need to be executed in the user’s browser. Instead, there is only one tracking script, significantly improving performance by shortening load times and minimizing resource strain for visitors. Solutions like JENTIS play a significant role in this context by efficiently and compliantly processing tracking on the server.

Reading tip: Learn more about the benefits and implementation in our blog post on server-side tracking.

Make sure to compare your website’s metrics before and after implementing these optimizations. Tools like WebPageTest help make improvements in site construction and performance visible.

Optimizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

An important step in web optimization is optimizing and minimizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Techniques applied here include:

  • Removing unnecessary white spaces, line breaks, and comments.
  • Combining and minimizing CSS and JavaScript files.
  • Structural sharing and merging similar selectors in stylesheets.
  • Outsourcing JavaScript code to external files.
  • Asynchronous loading of resources and scripts

To speed up your website’s construction, rely on asynchronous loading of resources and scripts. Here, not all resources load simultaneously but only as needed. To implement asynchronous loading, consider the following points:

  • Add the ‘async’ or ‘defer’ attribute to your JavaScript links.
  • Use CSS Media Queries to work resource-efficiently and time-effectively.
  • Use Lazy Loading for images and media to optimize visibility in the visible area.
  • Applying Critical Path Optimization

Critical Path Optimization refers to the fastest path a browser chooses to display the most crucial content of a webpage. Efficient Critical Path Optimization leads to faster content display and improves user experience. Consider the following:

  • Identify the critical resources needed for immediate display
  • Prioritize the loading of these resources by placing them earlier in the source code or loading them asynchronously
  • Reduce the number of requests by combining external files
  • Use inlining for critical CSS or JavaScript code to avoid additional requests.

With these strategies for web optimization and code minimization, including the efficient use of server-side tracking through solutions like JENTIS, you can significantly improve your website’s performance while offering an optimal user experience.

Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design

Mobile optimization and the implementation of responsive design are crucial for a positive user experience and play an important role in load time and interactivity on different devices.

Adaptive Layout for Various Devices

An adaptive layout ensures that your website is optimally displayed on various devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktop PCs. Consider the following aspects:

  • Using fluid layouts and flexible image sizes.
  • Incorporating media queries to adjust font sizes, columns, and other design elements.
  • Testing the display across different screen sizes and resolutions.

Mobile-First Strategy and Performance Optimization

A mobile-first strategy means optimizing the website for mobile devices first before adjusting for larger screens. Since Google has been prioritizing the mobile version of websites for some time, this approach is particularly relevant. When optimizing performance on mobile devices, you should pay attention to the following aspects:

  • Optimizing images for quick load times measured in milliseconds.
  • Asynchronous resource loading and optimizing JavaScript performance.
  • Mobile-specific compression and caching techniques.
  • Optimizing touch and interaction elements.

Adjusting touch and interaction elements is crucial to provide a good user experience on mobile devices. Here are some tips on how to improve your website:

  • Design touch-optimized control elements and call-to-action buttons with sufficient size and spacing.
  • Avoid Flash animations and elements, as they are not supported or are limited on many mobile devices.
  • Use lazy loading or content accordions to reduce load times and enhance interactivity.

Conclusion

Targeted PageSpeed optimization can significantly enhance the success of websites: It not only improves user experience but also contributes to better rankings in search engines. We show you how to equip your website for optimal performance with the following best practices:

Technical Optimization: Reduce file sizes, compress images, and utilize cross-browser caching technologies. Also, integrate server-side tracking to shift the execution of third-party scripts from the client to the server. This reduces the load on the user’s device and significantly improves load times. Solutions like JENTIS offer an efficient and compliant implementation that noticeably optimizes your website’s performance.

Mobile Performance: Adapt your website to different devices, ensuring that content such as texts, images, and videos are displayed smoothly and without errors on all devices. The ease and speed of page construction on mobile devices are further improved by reducing client-side scripts through server-side tracking.

Monitoring and Analysis: Use tools like Google Lighthouse or WebPagetest to regularly check your website’s performance, identify bottlenecks early, and continuously work on improvements. Performance analysis should also consider the efficiency of server-side tracking to ensure server response times and overall website performance remain optimized.

Utilize these insights to give your website a crucial performance boost: Focus on technical optimizations, including server-side tracking, and continuously monitor the results. Mobile performance is essential today to reach all potential customers. Through monitoring and analysis, you ensure a sustainable performance increase and give your website the opportunity to continuously improve.

About the Author

Steffen Grigori is deeply rooted in the dynamic world of modern marketing and sales. As the editor-in-chief at acquisa, the specialist medium for marketing, sales, and e-commerce, he has deep insights into the constantly changing landscape of trends and best practices in this industry. His work reflects his commitment to high-quality content and up-to-date information. He aims to provide the marketing community with tangible value and is proud to contribute to continuous education and expertise in the industry.

Sources: bloggingwizard.com