How much time does it take for Googlebot to crawl your site? Is it worth optimizing your pages for faster loading times?
Google has recently announced that they will start penalizing websites that don’t load within 3 seconds. This means that if your page takes longer than three seconds to load, then it might get demoted from its position in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
It’s true that having a slow website can hurt your rankings. In order to rank well in the search engines, you should optimize your webpages for speed. There are several ways to improve your website’s performance, such as using responsive design or building a mobile version of your site.
How To Speed Up Your Website
The speed of a web page depends on many factors such as server response time, network latency, bandwidth, connection quality, and how fast the data travels across the Internet. In addition, it is important to optimize your site for mobile devices because most people access the internet via smartphones and tablets. There are several ways you can improve the performance of your website without having to hire expensive developers. Here are some tips to help you make your site load faster.
1. Activate Browser Caching
Browser caching helps reduce the number of HTTP requests to your server by storing frequently requested assets locally. This allows browsers to retrieve those same items much quicker next time around. However, there are times when you want to disable cache headers. For example, if you are working on a special project and don’t want anyone else to see what you are doing. Also, if you are testing different versions of your site and don’t wish to keep old versions cached. You can do this by adding Cache-Control headers to your HTML documents.
2. Minify Resources
Minifying JavaScript, CSS, images, and fonts reduces the size of the file while maintaining functionality. If you are creating large amounts of static content like blog posts, press releases, and articles, minification makes sense. Otherwise, you might just be wasting space.
3. Enable Image Compression
In general, JPEG format files are smaller than PNG files. But, what about GIF files? They are almost always used for icons, logos, and animations. These small files take up less room on your hard drive and upload faster. So, if you use GIFs often, enable image compression.
4. Use Gzip Encoding
Gzipping compresses an entire webpage into one single file. It works by replacing all of the text with an encoded string of characters. The end result is a compressed file that is significantly smaller than the original.
5. Optimize Images
Images are usually the largest resource on any given page. Therefore, it is important to compress them before uploading them to your server. When you compress images, you are reducing their file sizes. And, you are also making them easier to download.
If All Else Fails, Take a Closer Look at Your Web Host
There are cases where website owners are left wondering why their websites are still slow, despite doing all of the tips above. In these cases, it is worth looking at the hosting service they are using. Because it does not matter how optimized your website is if the server you are hosting it on is slow. If you don’t want to be caught in this kind of scenario, you should get your website hosted by Blitz Marketing Group. Our cloud hosting service provides impressive speeds that will let you pass Google Pagespeed Insights with flying (or rather “green”) colors! Contact us today for more info or to get a FREE demo!