In times when almost any information is available at any time and from any place, websites and other online content must fulfil certain criteria in order to satisfy users (and therefore also search engines). One of these criteria is loading time. We explain how you can analyse performance and then optimise it to achieve better rankings in the long term.
Optimising performance means improving usability
Imagine you walk into a snack bar, you're really hungry and you just don't get served. What happens? Exactly, you leave the shop in a hurry and go to the competition in the hope of getting something to eat there more quickly. Even if you don't leave immediately, you're unlikely to come back.
Poor performance = high bounce rate
If you transfer this example to the digital world, the snack bar becomes the website and the speed of service becomes the loading time of this website. If you want to play in the top league in terms of rankings, you should think about your service, in other words your performance, as soon as possible. Google likes to rank websites that are particularly user-friendly. In addition to a coherent layout and clear presentation of a topic, user-friendliness also includes the loading time of the content. If the page takes too long to load, the bounce rate increases because many users click the "back button" and go to the next search result on the Google SERP.
Step 1: Performance check
Before you improve the performance of your website, it is best to first check how bad your PageSpeed actually is. You can use various tools to do this.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool provided by Google that allows you to check the performance of a particular URL in no time at all. Ideally, you will receive a "Good" rating for both the output on mobile devices and the output on the desktop device. If the loading time is not quite as optimal, the tool rates the performance as "Medium". There is a need for optimisation with a "low" rating. The great thing is that Google provides you with optimisation suggestions directly after the analysis.
Pingdom
Do you use the Pingdom Website Speed Test to analyse your page performance, you will notice that it provides a much more positive picture of loading times than Google's PageSpeed Insights. You also have the option of selecting different server locations for your query. After the analysis, the tool shows you the loading time (hopefully in milliseconds), the Google PageSpeed Performance Grade (should be A), the size of the website and a range of other data.
Webpage test
The analysis becomes even more comprehensive with the Tool from webpagetest.org. Here you can select a few more server locations and - especially cool - define the test environment (smartphone model, browser, etc.). The results are extremely comprehensive and provide an excellent database to help you optimise the performance of your website.
Step 2: Optimisation
Once you have analysed where the shoe pinches in terms of website load time, you can start with the optimisation.
To make the analysis data provided a little easier for you to understand: The most common causes of poor performance are...
...large amounts of data,
uncompressed images,
an overloaded theme and
slow databases & servers.
Rethink theme & deactivate unnecessary plugins
Your website runs on WordPress or Joomla! and the premium theme you bought looks really smart? That's fine, but it's not uncommon for themes to be completely overloaded, which leads to slow website loading times. Just have a look to see if there is a slimmer theme that is characterised not only by its immediately appealing look but also by its performance.
If the problem is not with the theme itself, plugins can also have a negative impact on the loading time of websites if there are too many database accesses. This is particularly the case with less well-known and poorly implemented plugins. Simply check which plugins have accumulated over time and uninstall anything you don't absolutely need.
Reduce HTTP requests
If fewer HTTP requests are made, your website will logically load faster. Such a server request is always made when a file needs to be loaded. So if you pack fewer files such as images, scripts etc. into a document, your page will also load faster.
Tip: You can combine various stylesheets into a single CSS file and link it from the HTML document area. If you ensure that there are no more inline style specifications in the HTML document, the CSS file can be cached, which also speeds up the page load.
Optimise images for the web
A website cannot do without good images (preferably in .jpg format) and graphics (preferably as .png files) - after all, a picture is often worth a thousand words. However, it is important that these images are optimised for the web to prevent long loading times. The most common mistake in this context is to upload images to the server in their original size and incorporate them into the content in exactly the same way.
Example: If an image is 2500 x 1000 pixels in size, but is only integrated into a 750 pixel wide content area, it will be displayed in a smaller size afterwards. However, the image or graphic must still be loaded in its full size. To avoid such unnecessary clutter, you should always reduce images to the size in which they are actually to be displayed.
By the way: As soon as a URL is called up, all images are usually loaded automatically - even those that are not yet visible, e.g. because you are not scrolling down that far. To load images only when required, you can use plugins such as Crazy Lazy use. And to give you another plugin tip straight away: WP Smush.it automatically compresses the file size of images during upload. You can also use it to subsequently optimise images that have already been uploaded.
Gzip compression
Not only images, but also system files (e.g. from WordPress) can be compressed. How does this work? Quite simply with Gzip, a free compression programme that, just like the file format, is available for all operating systems. All you have to do is insert a code snippet into the .htaccess file. With WordPress, you don't have to do this manually, but can rely on plugins such as Gzip Ninja Speed Compression to fall back on. Joomla also has corresponding extensions that do exactly the same thing.
Use caching
As a WordPress user, you also need a good caching plugin. Caching creates static versions of all pages instead of creating them dynamically - with great effects on the loading speed of the entire website. A very well-written caching plugin for WordPress is Cachify. You can get the all-round carefree package with the W3 Total Cache plugin. Alternatively WP Rocket a little rocket from your side.
Extra tip:
To further speed up your website, you can remove unnecessary spaces and line breaks from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Because this makes the entire code leaner, the loading time is also reduced. The only thing that deteriorates is the clarity of the code. The previously mentioned Plugin W3 Total Cache offers you as a WordPress user a so-called "Minify" function at this point. However, this only works particularly well if you define how the Java scripts should be loaded in the manual mode of the plugin itself. As this is not really suitable for beginners in particular, we recommend using the Plugin Autoptimise.
