Users demand speed, search engines reward performance, and slow websites lose traffic and conversions. We understand you have put so much into setting up your site from scratch. Even made it look and feel great, but after all your efforts, website metrics are no good.
If you want to stand out among thousands of competing websites, a fast-loading site is crucial. Many brands find it difficult to reduce bounce rates because they lack a comprehensive speed optimization approach.
To help you get more visibility and deliver a better user experience, we’ve created a simple website speed optimization checklist. Follow these steps and turn red or orange core web vitals into green.
But first things first, let’s understand how optimizing your website speed will help.
Why Website Performance Optimization Even Matter?
When search engines like Google rank results, they ensure that they only show the best of the best web pages to their users. And this time, your site speed and performance play a key role. Your core web vital scores decide whether you will show up on the first page or the tenth in search results. Plus, site speed sets the impression of your services in front of visitors if they are genuine and fast.
So, to ace 90+ scores on GTMetrix, website speed optimization becomes a need.
1. Lower Bounce Rates:
If a website takes too long to load, it will miss conversion opportunities regularly. On the other hand, fast sites open the doors for visitors to engage and interact with your content. The longer they stay on your pages, the more chances that they can convert into your customers.
2. Improved SEO Rankings:
Speedy sites give signals to search engines that we are efficient and please crawl and index us more effectively. The higher a site ranks, the more organic traffic it gets. So, you can see slow website will not be able to make as much money as a fast site owner can make.
3. Better Security & Reliability:
Websites that only take a standard time to load (mostly less than 2 seconds) tend to build more trust and give users confidence in a brand. All this, while protecting the business from potential attacks and failures. Speed enhancement tactics like caching and script optimization can make this happen for your site too.
Now you may ask how to know if my website is slow and causing visitors trouble. Well, don’t worry, here is the help for you.
Top Tools to Check Website Performance Instantly
We recommend you always test your website speed through the best tools available in the market. So, always audit your site performance, and perform Core Web Vitals Optimization to improve what your real users are experiencing.
Use the below-mentioned tools for this:
How Core Web Vitals Optimization Define The Future of Your Site?
Core web vitals are like a fitness checkup for your site. They measure your website on factors like LCP, FID, CLS, INP, and TTFB. If you pass these tests, then only you can become one of the choices for Google and will show up in search results.
- LCP: Largest Contentful Paint checks how fast your biggest picture or text shows up.
- FCP: First Contentful Paint means how fast you see something on a screen when you open a webpage.
- CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift checks if the page stays still, or does it jumps around.
- INP: Interaction to Next Paint finds out how quickly your website reacts when you click something.
- TTFB: Time to First Byte check website performance on how fast the website starts loading.
If your site is slow or messy, there are high chances for it to get left behind. However, you can prevent this by just optimizing your site using the below website performance optimization tips.
Website Speed Optimization Checklist That Really Works
Are you tired of searching for answers on, “How can I optimize my website for better speed?”; but all you get is why it matters, not how to do it.
Well, wait this blog is different. Now you may ask how, then, let me tell you this guide is written by specialists, who have been providing WordPress page speed optimization services for over 10+ years now to complex to complex sites. They have curated their secret recipe here, so let’s just follow their instructions:
1. Optimize Images
- Convert images to WebP to reduce image size without losing quality and upload these to your website instead of large PNG or JPEG files.
- Enable lazy loading by adding the loading=”lazy” attribute to image tags as it prevents all images from loading at once. However, If you’re using a CMS, enable lazy loading in settings.
- Compress images before uploading using an image compression tool. Just reduce file size, not the quality, and remove unnecessary data.
- Use the right dimensions and resize images to match your website’s layout. Remember, that you do not upload giant images, where a small one can perfectly work.
- Store Images in a Fast Server or CDN and allow visitors to load images quickly, no matter where they are.
2. Minify & Compress Files
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to remove spaces, comments, and extra code. You can use an online tool or a plugin like W3Speedster to do this automatically if your site is too big.
- Compress files using Gzip or Brotli and enable compression in your server settings. This way you can reduce the file size before sending them to the browser.
- Store minified and compressed files on a fast server or CDN. You can even update and re-minify them after changes to keep them optimized and efficient.
3. Leverage Browser Caching
- Set expiration dates for static files (images, CSS, and JavaScript) in your server settings for repeat visitors. This will help load your site faster without downloading the same files again.
- Update your .htaccess file or server configuration to define cache rules for different file types. Plus, one more tip: assign longer cache durations for files that don’t change often and shorter durations for frequently updated ones.
- Use cache-control headers to tell browsers how long they should keep specific files.
- Make use of versioning for updated files by adding a unique identifier to file names. So that visitors always get the latest content while still benefiting from cached files.
4. Remove HTTPS Requests:
- You should Merge CSS and JS files to reduce multiple requests for better Page Speed Optimization. Also, make sure to keep only essential files and remove unused ones.
- Use CSS sprites to combine multiple images into a single file and display only the needed parts to reduce extra requests.
- Delete all unnecessary plugins, fonts, and third-party scripts to limit additional requests.
5. Optimize Server Response Time
- Upgrade your hosting plan to a faster server with better resources and low latency.
- Plus, the truest website performance optimization technique would be to use server-side caching for frequently accessed data.
- Keep your database clean, and in structure by removing unnecessary data, fixing slow queries, and using indexing.
- Use a CDN to distribute website content across multiple locations through the closest server.
- Minimize server requests by reducing redirects, optimizing scripts, and limiting unnecessary plugins.
6. Optimize Content
- Use only the fonts you need and load them asynchronously. Enable font-display: swap in CSS, compress, and host them locally for faster access.
- Minify the unnecessary long CSS, combine the small ones, and remove the unused ones. Plus, you must use critical CSS to load important styles first.
- Use Defer to delay script execution, async to load scripts, plus, apply Code Splitting to load only the required JavaScript.
7. Optimize Database & Third-Party Scripts
- Make your website fast by keeping the database clean and running only smart searches.
- One of the smartest website performance optimization tips is to use fewer plugins and remove the ones you don’t need.
- Let important scripts load first and delay the extra ones.
- Cutting down on ads and tracking codes that slow things down is the best tip in this website optimization checklist.
- Keep everything simple, light, and updated so your site runs smoothly all the time.
Advanced Performance Optimization:
Now that you have already handled the basics, it’s time to take performance to the next level. Use these advanced techniques to make your site even faster. Follow this website speed optimization checklist and give your users the smoothest experience possible.
1. Implement HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
You have to enable HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 in your server settings to allow multiple files to load at once instead of one by one as this will reduce waiting time and speed up page loading.
2. Preload & Prefetch Resources
Make use of preloading important files (fonts, scripts, and images) by adding the <link rel=”preload”> tag in your HTML.
And, prefetch the external resources through <link rel=”dns-prefetch”> for domains and for files use <link rel=”prefetch”> and prepare your content in advance.
3. Server-Side Rendering & Static Site Generation
Use SSR to generate pages on the server before sending them to users. Plus, apply SSG to pre-build pages and serve them as ready-to-load files.
4. Reducing Third-Party Script Load
For this, you have to remove unnecessary tracking codes, ads, and widgets and only load essential ones that even asynchronously.
The website performance optimization techniques listed above are not all of the tips that can possibly enhance page speed, but rather the most popular ones and the ones with the highest improvement potential.
So, take a look at one of the important parts of this website optimization checklist.
Device-Specific Optimization: How to Do It?
Where a mobile page takes about 1.9 seconds to load on average; on a desktop, it only takes approximately 1.7 seconds. Even more than half of visitors leave a website right away if it takes more than 3 seconds to fetch. Here comes the need for page speed optimization on every device. But how do you do it, is this your question? Then look below:
1. Desktop Optimization
Optimize desktop performance by improving browser rendering. Just, remove extra CSS and JavaScript and keep only what is needed for faster loading. Load important content first by optimizing the critical path. Plus, you should enable hardware acceleration to make animations smooth and even reduce CPU load for a better experience.
2. Mobile Optimization
Make mobile speed faster by using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) so pages load instantly. Apply responsive design with flexible layouts and images, so your website fits any screen size. But don’t stop there, instead, you can fix mobile issues by removing heavy scripts, improving touch response, and enabling caching for even better website performance optimization.
3. Tablet Optimization
Enhance the tablet experience by using adaptive layouts that adjust between portrait and landscape mode. Just scale images properly so they load fast and look good. Plus, make navigation easy by increasing button sizes and spacing interactive elements to avoid mistakes.
Don’t stop here, otherwise all your hard work will go in vain. Don’t you know your website demands care, yes crucial things require extra care and affection. But how can you show affection or care towards your website, I have an answer and the solution to even this. Just watch out, update, and alter whichever is off on your site. In the below I have shared the solution, so don’t you dare miss out.
Regular Maintenance & Continuous Monitoring Helps
You should just check website performance in real-time to catch any slowdowns instantly. Instead of waiting for problems, use tools that track loading speed, server response, and user interactions every second.
Plus, set up synthetic monitoring to test your site from different locations and make sure it works well everywhere. Rather than guessing, use Real User Monitoring (RUM) to see exactly how visitors experience your site and fix any slow areas.
You should even prepare for sudden traffic spikes by scaling your servers, adding load balancers, and using a content delivery network (CDN) to keep everything running smoothly.
But don’t stop there; keep checking, updating, and fixing issues regularly to make sure your website stays fast and stable all the time.
Still, Need Help for Website Performance Optimization?
As our aim for writing this blog is to provide you with website performance optimization techniques that really work. Now that you have read all the possible tips from this website speed optimization checklist you can start improving your site right from today.
But remember this manual tweaking demands time so you have to be prepared for it. Plus, regularly watching out and updating can feel too much to anyone.
So, instead of this, you can rely on an automated tool like W3Speedster which will effectively and instantly identify performance issues and fix them on its own.
And, the best part, it is the first choice of smart business owners who want fast results without the hassle of explaining issues to a support team of a WordPress page speed optimization service.
So, why not invest in W3Speedster when it is the most affordable site optimization tool out there?
