As you may remember, Google announced page speed as a ranking factor for desktop and mobile search not too long ago.

Speed, however, is not only important for higher rankings in Google, but it is also essential for helping your conversion rates.

Having a speedy website will have a snowball effect. Higher rankings will lead to more traffic. More traffic will lead to more potential sales and fast loading pages will help get your offer in front of users quickly to help increase conversions.

Here are some tips on how to speed up your website

Reduce Image Sizes

Images are a great way to engage readers and illustrate the points you are trying to make in your articles. However, while they look beautiful, they can be large and slow down your page loading time.

Most of the time it doesn’t make sense to remove them completely. So what do you do?

You can resize them if you have native programs like Photoshop. Be sure to resize them to the exact size you want them to appear. Otherwise, the site will load the original size then adjust it to the size you set which increase the time it takes to load the entire image.

After you have your images sized properly, you should compress them as well. Compressing them keeps the quality but can greatly reduce the size of the image file.

You can either do this with a plugin if you are using Wordpress or other tools like tinypng.

Simply upload your image to the tool and redownload it before uploading it to your site.

Should you use JPGs or PNGs? This depends on the type of image. As a general rule of thumb, you should use JPGs for photos and PNGs for graphic designs like logos, screenshots or infographics.

Minify CSS/Javascript

Another factor that affects the page loading speed is how many HTTP requests are made by your site to the server when loading a particular page.

Different parts of the page can require different requests, each one adding some time to the load.

One way you can decrease the number of requests is by minifying your CSS and Javascript files.

Many page builder plugins for Wordpress work wonderfullly and help you create beautiful pages without the need to know much code but they can really slow down your site.

The process of minifying these files removes extra whitespace, line breaks, unnecessary formatting to help keep your code as clean and lean as possible.

You can also combine these files so instead of having X number of files creating X number of HTTP requests you can simply combine them into one.

If you don’t have the necessary coding skills to perform these items on your own there are several plugins you can use like WP Fastest Cache.

Use Asynchronous Loading

Another thing a plugin like WP Fastest Cache can help with is using asynchronous loading for your CSS and javascript files. So once you have minified and combined them you will want to turn this feature on.

By allowing them to load asynchronously vs synchronously, you are allowing them to load simultaneously instead of one at a time which can have a big impact on loading your website.

This way all of the elements of your webpage can load at the same time instead of waiting in line for each element to finish before the next.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we offer other tips on speeding up your site!