It is quite obvious that page loading speed has a huge impact on the overall experience of the site visitor. With this in mind, major search engines do take this factor into account. Having a site that loads really fast should be one of your main goals due to the fact that this will increase your SERP for the covered keywords. It is one of the first things that you should do when you start an on-page SEO campaign.
Below you can find some really simple tips that you can easily consider. While in some situations you will not be able to do much since your hosting provider will have an impact on page loading speed, every single bit of help counts. Before you consider the following, head over to Google’s Page Speed Test service and see what your score is. Make the advertised changes and then see what your final rating will be.
Always Optimize Your Database
Most of the modern websites have a database that is used to store some information. This is the case for e-commerce sites, news sites, blogs and basically any website with some sort of dynamic function. As time passes, the database becomes larger and will have an impact on page load speed.
Make sure that you add an index to optimize the database. In many situations, a page that loads in around 5 seconds can end up loading in 1 second in the event that there is a missing index and you add it.
Remove Tracking Codes That Are Not Needed
A really common problem is installing too many tracking codes. For instance, you may activate the Jetpack Stats feature and have Analytics installed on your website. Do you really need both? Whenever designing modern pages, simplicity is vital. Do not add another tracking code. Look for one that has all the options that you need. It is impossible not to find something like that. If you do not know what to choose, just use Google Analytics.
Remove Video Embeds
Many do not know this but when you add a video to your page, you usually use iframes, which basically means that a secondary page is loaded. Many embed more than one video. This automatically reduces page speed. If you absolutely need to add YouTube clips to your site, at least try to add only one on your home page.
Remove Share Buttons
This is something you should consider in the event that you need to do anything that you can in order to reduce load speed. Most of the share buttons are javascript based. Javascript will generate an iFrame. If you want to use share buttons, which is completely understandable, try to use only one set. If possible, use one that would take advantage of a content delivery network (more on that later).
Try To Use Caching When You Can
When caching is used, all the texts, scripts and images on your server will be stored on the cache of the browser. If the visitor ends up on another page and there is common content (like a header or a footer), the content will already be available and will appear much faster on the website. Such a modification will not show in the page speed tests but it is something that you would love because of the fact that the user experience will be much better.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
You may have reached a site and got a message that it is down but a version is still delivered by Cloud Flare. Cloud Flare is, most likely, the most popular content delivery network used at the moment. The system is highly profitable because it can drastically increase page load speed.
Content delivery networks will store website copies on various servers located all around the world. When a visitor comes to your site, the closest location will be determined and his computer is connected to the server that would load the content in the shortest period of time.
