Speed Optimization

You only get one chance to make a first impression on your website users and speed is essential for attracting and keeping them. Speed performance optimization needs careful monitoring and analysis of your site or web app so you can identify how to improve page and other metrics.

Your site speed and performance (i.e. how quickly web content loads and renders and how quickly it responds to interaction from visitors) are some of the key factors to your online business success. They affect the search engine rankings (SEO), your visitors' experience (UX), the conversion rates and repeat business.

After testing your website speed, you can employ many techniques to improve its performance. Some of the best ways to achieve it are by reviewing your hosting options (shared, VPS or dedicated server), resizing and optimising images, identifying and reducing plugins causing performance issues, using caching, optimising your code and database.

Speed is so important for a website that it has become a direct ranking factor for Google, especially since the Google Algorithm Speed Update. It can also affect your ranking indirectly as slow load times can increase bounce rates and dwell times. This is increasingly important for mobile sites so you should always test.

It’s important to measure valuable performance metrics such as load time, the number of requests, page sizes, resources taking too long to load, time to first byte (TTM) and first meaningful paint (FMP). Tools like Sematext, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix etc. can give you invaluable insights and direct calls to action.