Improving Website Load Time: Key Factors That Affect SEO and User Experience

Need Help? Partner with Digital Marketing Agencies

Improving your website load time is not a task that can be accomplished quickly. You have to identify the issues and then come up with solutions. The actual execution also takes time and effort.

If this is too overwhelming, consider partnering with digital marketing agencies like Bryant Digital.

The experts will help you with these things. They can give you advice on how to make your website more responsive or improve your ranking on search engine results.

Bryant Digital will even handle it for you! It allows you to focus on creating products or improving your services, tasks that actually earn you money.

Mobile-Friendliness

Before we proceed with the actual elements that you could fix, you should know about this first. Google, the most-used search engine, uses a mobile-first indexing approach.

That means that when ranking websites, it looks at their mobile versions first. Considering the fact that more than half of website visitors are using mobile phones, this approach makes sense.

With that in mind, optimizing the mobile version of your website should be your priority. It does not mean that you should ignore the desktop version, though, as it still matters. But if you want to improve your rank sooner, the mobile version comes first.

Top Factors That Influence Your Website’s Speed and Performance

Here are the elements that could be causing your website’s loading speed and how you can improve them.

Web Hosting Service

Choosing the right web hosting service ensures your website will perform well. You could choose between shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting.

Shared hosting is cost-effective but may result in slower loading times and higher security risks. Dedicated server hosting offers excellent performance but can be expensive. VPS hosting provides a middle ground, offering decent performance and security at a price point lower than dedicated hosting, though it may not match the full power of a dedicated server.

We recommend choosing either dedicated or virtual private server hosting.

Unoptimized Code

Bad code is never good for systems or websites. Therefore, you should revisit your code to find ways to improve it. One thing you can do is remove unused, dead, or redundant code. These could be for functions that are no longer available on your website. Thus, they are no longer necessary.

Minifying your code is also good practice. Think about removing extra spaces, line breaks, and comments to reduce the bytes that need to be downloaded when loading your website.

You should also check for JavaScript errors and invalid HTML markups, as these could also slow down your website.

Likewise, you should monitor power-hungry processes, tracking pixels, monitoring tools, chatbots, and widgets. These elements could impact your website’s loading speed. Determine if they are still valuable and remove them if they are not.

Images

If the images on your website load slowly, it may affect the user experience. It could also affect the overall responsiveness of your website. Additionally, if these are infographics, it will take a while before your visitors can read their content.

As such, you should also check the images on your website. You should replace images that have a large file size, high resolution, or are saved in an unideal format.

Here are some pointers:

File Size: A large image file size means more bytes are needed to be downloaded. So, it is wise to compress images to make them smaller. The ideal file size is 10 KB. Be picky when choosing a tool to compress your images. Select ones that can reach the target size with as little quality loss as possible.

Dimensions: While browsers can scale images, we don’t recommend you take advantage of that. It gives the browser an extra job to do, which could affect your website’s loading speed and performance. That said, you should scale your images yourself. For full-width hero images, you could go up to 1200 – 1600 pixels. For blog images, we recommend 600 – 800 pixels and 150 – 250 for thumbnails.

File Format: The file format you choose also affects loading times. For solid blocks of colors or images that need to be a little more on the high-quality side, choose PNG. JPG is a great choice as these images usually have smaller file sizes. WEBP is one of the top go-to options, offering a transparency channel, animation, and low file sizes.

HTTP Requests

Browsers need to send HTTP requests for each image, CSS file, and script on a web page. More requests that need to be sent mean slower loading time. So, it is wise to reduce the number of assets that need to be loaded for each web page.

Your website should also be able to deliver content over HTTP2, which is faster and more reliable compared to HTTP1.

Conclusion

The loading speed of your website is one of the biggest factors that affects its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). If it is too slow, it may make you miss leads that could have increased your profits.

With that in mind, you should improve your website loading speed. To do so, you need to compress the images, reduce the number of assets for each page, minify your code, and more.

For the best results, we recommend partnering with digital marketing and SEO experts. They can pinpoint what’s wrong with your website and fix them. With them on the job, you can focus on tasks that drive growth for your company.