How to Optimize website speed: best SEO practices

The speed at which an online page loads becomes measurable through page speed.

Online users frequently mistake site speed for page speed, even though site speed reflects the average speed of multiple page views across the site. Page speed consists of two measurement methods, which are page load time (the total duration needed for complete page display) and time to first byte (the time needed for browsers to fetch the initial web server information byte).

Google PageSpeed Insights provides a service to measure your page speed. The Speed Score based on PageSpeed Insights derives its data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) to measure two critical speed standards, including First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).

SEO best practices to optimize website speed

A series of methods exists to minimize your page speed load time, including the following:

1. Compress Your Images

A visual element added to your content makes websites more interesting to viewers. A considerable number of web page sizes are made up of images.

Large, high-resolution images tend to decrease loading speed significantly when visitors attempt to access web content, thus creating user frustrations.

The issues related to large image file sizes can be solved by web developers and designers through tools like ImageOptim and TinyPNG.

Such website improvement tools make images smaller while preserving original quality, which leads to quicker web page loading.

People often choose appropriate image formats according to their desired outcome. Each image format delivers particular advantages, which make it important to select the format that best fits the task.

Photographs with important color variations benefit most from the JPEG format.

The clear image and well-defined line structures of PNG recommend it for use.

 2. Don’t Host Your Videos Locally

Storing video files that consume server memory space creates a performance problem, which slows down local website hosting. Organizations must research efficient file compression techniques and suitable hosting solutions for their needs.

YouTube and Vimeo make excellent choices because they deliver uninterrupted streaming along with excellent user experiences. Businesses that aim to exercise full control over their content usually select cloud-based services, including AWS S3.

Amazon AWS S3 homepage

Additional video optimization steps can be implemented through the following procedures:

• The video needs to support various devices through multiple formats, which should automatically adjust to different screen sizes. Video hosting systems serve customers with the optimal video versions they need according to their connected device type.
• Use embedded video specifications to determine display parameters that include dimensions plus interface controls to deliver proper video presentation along with simple user controls.

• Integrate adaptive bitrate streaming because it automatically changes the video quality based on the real-time network performance of viewers.
• The video’s load should happen only when users scroll to a video section through lazy loading technology, which strengthens initial page loading efficiency.
• The preloading technique guarantees a smooth playback experience for crucial videos you want visitors to see by loading all videos in advance.

3. Use a Quality Hosting Plan

The performance of your site directly depends on your hosting provider selection. Your website’s speed suffers greatly from a slow host service, which creates sluggish page loads and damages user experience.

Select a hosting service that explicitly focuses on high-speed operation along with seamless performance.

People looking for fast web hosting services should choose Hostinger as their provider. Our web hosting brings maximum performance combined with solutions for all user skill levels through multiple structured plans.

Our site speed enhancement supports features which include:

• The web hosting service by Hostinger utilizes Solid-State Drives (SSDs) to speed up file retrieval processes in comparison to regular storage hard drives.
• The dedicated servers at Hostinger come ready to deliver improved loading speeds for WordPress users, among other prominent content management systems.
• Hostinger CDN delivers a free service that shortens the time needed to fetch resources to meet user demands.
• All Hostinger hosting plans incorporate LiteSpeed web servers as well as object cache to deliver rapid website loading speed.
• The service provides endless data transfer capacity, which enables smooth operation under high web traffic volumes.
• Website speed test tools provide users with an assortment of monitoring tools that aid in simplifying website optimization.

4. Avoid Too Many Animations

Website animations create exciting visual layers, but they require additional speed reduction alongside increased resource consumption. Smooth operation of visuals depends on high resource consumption because complex motion effects need additional computing power.

Displaying numerous animations can slow down website performance, mainly for visitors who access the site through old devices and slower internet connections. Website owners should carefully choose their animations to guarantee better usability because excessive animation implementation affects their websites negatively.

What to do

• Select the animations that matter most for the website experience because only these animations create value for users. The rest of the animations should be eliminated.
• Select weight-reducing technologies since weight-reducing animation options provide the best results. When it comes to animations, both CSS-based solutions tend to run more efficiently than animations developed with JavaScript.
• When working with custom animation, maintain the codebase as efficiently and directly as you can. Your website speed may be diminished by the bloated code that exists on your website.
• Conduct testing on the design to measure animation effects on website speed before final implementation. You should run A/B testing through the GTmetrix website speed testing tools to determine how animations influence web page loading durations.

5. Optimize Your Code

Website speed optimization fundamentally depends on the optimization process for code. The speed of page loading operations significantly improves when the website code remains neat with an organized structure and achieves a minimal size.

To optimize website performance, you need to execute several measures which entail shortening code size while eliminating unused information, together with decreasing server requests your site demands.

6. Use Lazy Loading

Lazy loading delays complete content delivery until users view the visible section of a page when it loads. The webpage loads more content when the user reaches the end of the displayed information through scrolling.

Implementing this method leads to faster page loading at the beginning, which provides positive results for users on poor connections or older technological devices.

To execute lazy loading successfully, you need to follow this strategy:

• To start lazy loading, it is crucial to find out which page elements will benefit from this technique. The most suitable parts for lazy-loading procedures include images, as well as videos and iframes.
• Modern browsers enable native lazy loading through the loading=”lazy” element that users can directly apply to image and iframe HTML components.
• To achieve advanced lazy loading implementation, you should include JavaScript libraries from lozad.js or lazysizes.
• Complete testing twice – Verify how the lazy loading method functions through end-to-end website testing to confirm proper content delivery and check for visual and operational, and performance issues.

 7. Minimize HTTP Requests

The number of demands for HTTP information your visitors make against the server directly affects website speed performance. The browser generates these requests to access various resources, which include pictures as well as stylesheets, together with scripts.

A slow website develops when multiple HTTP requests create excessive overhead that impairs your page loading time.

This guide provides specific recommendations to reduce the total number of HTTP requests for your website.

• Numerous stylesheets should combine into a single file while eliminating multi-file implementation.
• Apply CSS image sprites, which consist of a single file containing various small images. The technique of CSS positioning allows you to reveal specific parts of sprite images when needed to decrease the load of individual files.
• Your JavaScript and jQuery code needs to stay short, while you should apply the async or deferring attributes to scripting tags to load the files asynchronously, because delayed rendering is acceptable.
• You should include small resources directly into your HTML when dealing with images or small scripts and styles. This method should be limited in practice because excessive usage generates bulky HTML documents.

8. Enable Keep-Alive

Keep-Alive operates as a mechanism that enables various HTTP requests and responses to pass through one TCP connection.

By using this technique, your website can avoid repeatedly establishing new connections because it operates through a single TCP connection, thus leading to faster data transfer time.

Various benefits accrue because of decreased connection overhead for each transaction.

• The implementation of so-called three-way handshake processes introduces delays into every connection. The Keep-Alive option enables performance improvements by allowing data to go through pre-existing connections.
• The server achieves increased efficiency because fewer connections result in less computational power needed.
• Your website load time increases because the use of fewer connections during setup reduces the configuration time, thus providing faster page processing to users.

9. Reduce the Number of Redirects

Responders fulfill functional website needs when you redesign or present updated material, but they create obstacles to web speed enhancement attempts.

Web page loading time extends with each server request that a redirect generates.

These recommendations can help you decrease the number of redirects on your website:

• Examine redirects through performance audit software to find out which ones are unnecessary. Consider removing or updating them.
• Links should always be direct within content and navigation sections to prevent additional redirections from happening.
• The use of chain redirect sequences should be limited because they create a slowdown effect in website performance.
• Use 302 temporary website redirects sparingly because they remain essential only for limited situations. Use 301 permanent redirects since they offer better speed performance.

Conclusion

A single-speed optimization task does not exist. The optimization process continues indefinitely while affecting multiple server-level aspects as well as coding methods.

Web hosting providers should become a primary focus when choosing a company that understands speed optimization. Hostinger provides its users robust built-in tools through an optimized hosting service that delivers superior performance results.

The following four website optimization methods enhance Hostinger’s high-speed web hosting service:

• The optimization of your code should include file streamlining through UglifyJS and CSSNano applications.
• Your website speed benefits from website caching techniques that establish valid time lengths for various resources, including images and scripts, to enhance the response time for returning users.
• Using a content delivery network distribution system helps lower bandwidth usage while providing users with faster access.
• Hostinger users should adopt accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to improve mobile page loading speed.