Website optimisation guide

Website optimisation

A fast-loading website can improve user engagement, retention, and conversion rates, while a slow-loading website can frustrate users, increase bounce rates, and hurt your online reputation.

Google says the ideal PageSpeed score is 90 or above, while anything below 50 is considered poor. However, achieving a high PageSpeed score is not always easy, as many factors can affect your website performance, such as your hosting provider, images, JavaScript and CSS files, web fonts, and more.

Fortunately, there are some website optimisation strategies and best practices that you can implement to optimise your website performance for PageSpeed and make your website as fast as possible.

Here are some of the most effective ones:

 

Use a reliable and fast hosting provider.

Your hosting provider is the foundation of your website performance, as it determines how quickly your server can respond to requests and deliver your web pages. Therefore, you should choose a hosting provider with high-speed servers, low latency, high uptime, and good customer support. You can use tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to test your server response time and compare hosting providers.

 

Website optimisation – images

Images are one of the most significant and common elements on web pages, but they can also slow down your website if they are not optimised properly. To optimise your images, you should:

• Resize your images to fit the dimensions of your web page layout
• Compress your images to reduce their file size without compromising their quality
• Use the appropriate image format for different purposes (e.g., JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics, SVG for icons)
• Use responsive images to serve different versions of your images based on the device and screen size of your users
• Use lazy loading to defer loading images that are not in the initial viewport until they are needed

You can use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to optimise your images online or offline.

 

Website optimisation – minify and combine your JavaScript and CSS files

JavaScript and CSS files are essential for adding functionality and style to your web pages, but they can also increase the number of requests and the amount of data your browser has to load. To minimise this impact, you should:

• Minify your JavaScript and CSS files to remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, or code.
• Combine your JavaScript and CSS files into fewer files to reduce the number of requests.
• Use external JavaScript and CSS files instead of inline or embedded ones to enable caching.
• Place your JavaScript files at the bottom of your HTML document and your CSS files at the top to avoid blocking the rendering of your web page.

You can use tools like UglifyJS or CSSNano to minify your JavaScript and CSS files online or offline.

 

Compression and caching help with website optimisation.

Compression and caching are two techniques that can significantly reduce the amount of data that your server has to send and your browser has to download. Compression reduces the size of your web pages and resources by using algorithms like Gzip or Brotli, while caching stores copies of your web pages and resources on your server or browser for faster access. To enable compression and caching, you should:

• Configure your server to compress your web pages and resources using Gzip or Brotli.
• Configure your server to send cache-control headers to instruct browsers how long to cache your web pages and resources.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute your web pages and resources across multiple servers worldwide for faster delivery.
• Use a service worker to create a custom caching strategy for offline access.

You can use tools like Check Gzip Compression or WebPageTest to check if your website’s compression and caching are enabled.

 

Use Google’s PageSpeed tools.

Google offers tools to help you analyse and optimise your website performance for PageSpeed. These tools include:

• PageSpeed Insights: This tool provides you with a PageSpeed score and a list of suggestions to improve it for mobile and desktop devices.
• PageSpeed Modules: These are open-source modules that you can install on your Apache or Nginx server to rewrite and optimise resources on your website automatically.
• Hosted Libraries: These are popular open-source JavaScript libraries you can use from Google’s infrastructure instead of hosting them on your server.
• WebP: This new image format offers better compression than JPEG or PNG without sacrificing quality.
• AMP: This framework allows you to create fast-loading web pages that follow performance best practices.

You can use these tools individually or together to optimise your website performance for PageSpeed and make your website faster and better.

 

Conclusion

Website optimisation for PageSpeed benefits your SEO, user experience, business, and brand. Following this article’s strategies and best practices can achieve a high PageSpeed score and make your website stand out.

 

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