The performance and speed of your web pages are crucial factors for SEO and user experience. If your pages load slowly, bounce off, or have poor usability, you may lose traffic, conversions, and rankings. In this article, you will learn how to measure and improve the performance and speed of your web pages using some simple tools and techniques.
Performance and speed refer to how fast your web pages load, render, and respond to user interactions. They affect how users perceive and engage with your content, as well as how search engines crawl and index your site. Poor performance and speed can lead to high bounce rates, low dwell time, poor conversion rates, and lower rankings. On the other hand, fast and smooth web pages can boost user satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and conversions.
In order to improve your performance and speed, you must first measure them and identify the issues that affect them. Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and Core Web Vitals are some of the most popular and useful tools and metrics for this purpose. Google PageSpeed Insights scores your web pages based on their performance on mobile and desktop devices, while Lighthouse audits your web pages for performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices. WebPageTest allows you to test your web pages from different locations, browsers, and devices. Core Web Vitals measure the quality of the user experience on your web pages with metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
To improve performance and speed, you can implement some best practices and techniques. Optimizing images by reducing size, compressing them, using responsive images, and using lazy loading techniques can have a major impact. Additionally, minifying and compressing code such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can help. Leveraging a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce latency and bandwidth issues is also beneficial. Browser caching allows web pages and assets to be stored in the user's browser for a period of time, reducing the number of requests and downloads needed. Lastly, render-blocking resources should be eliminated by inlining them, deferring them, or using async or preload attributes.
A high LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is one of the major contributors to slow website load times. To address this issue, I suggest the following steps: Check the format of your images. Use an image conversion tool. Convert images into WebP format. Re-upload the optimized images onto your website. WebP is a Google-developed image format designed to compete with PNG and JPEG. It offers twice the compression rate of these formats, resulting in significantly smaller image sizes without compromising quality.
Improving your performance and speed is a continuous process which requires regular monitoring and maintenance. To do this, you can set performance budgets - limits or thresholds based on your goals and expectations - and use performance monitoring tools to detect trends, patterns, anomalies, and opportunities for improvement. Examples of such tools are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and New Relic. Moreover, performing performance audits using tools such as Lighthouse, WebPageTest, or GTmetrix can help you measure your performance and speed against industry standards and best practices.
Performance and speed are not only technical issues, but also business issues that can have a substantial effect on SEO, user experience, conversion rate, revenue, and reputation. To effectively communicate this to stakeholders like clients, managers, developers, or marketers, it’s important to use visual aids such as charts, graphs, tables, screenshots, videos or animations to highlight the key points and compare results. Additionally, storytelling techniques such as using a narrative arc and setting the context can help you structure the data in a coherent way while connecting with your audience. Finally, using common language that avoids jargon and acronyms is essential for conveying your message clearly and concisely.