How to improve your loading speed of web – Elabs Consulting

Did you know that the speed of loading web it is one of the most influential factors in terms of organic ranking?

Would you like to know how to measure your speed web to check if your load is the best?

So, once you have detected everything that happens around you knowing how to use Google Trendsand you're monitoring correctly for your panel of Google Data Studiothe next step to optimizing your website, it is the upload speed.

In the age of immediacy, trying to access a website and this afternoon to load more time than expected, it is more than frustrating, because users are not willing to wait. Google knows this, and his goal is that users can navigate conveniently from any network and any device, not only from the last generation. In consequence, the search engine puts them in their rankings to the websites faster.

Therefore, if we want to optimize our website for SEO, we must carry out a analysis of speed website to make sure that it loads fast. For this reason, in this article we'll talk about the metrics that you have to take in account to optimize your site, we'll give you some tips for reducing the loading time, and several tools that will be useful to make a speed test web.

Why do we need to improve the load time of the web?

The load time of a website is directly proportional to the probability of the user leaving the site, according to the data from Googlethe rebound can be increased up to 90% in sites that take between 1 second and 5 seconds to load. And there is a 62% chance of not re-purchase on your website if you have a bad experience with the site. With these data, the reasons to improve the speed of a web gain weight.

In addition, the upload speed is also a factor of seo, Google has always had in mind that the user could access the information as soon as possible, and in July, 2018 announces an update in which the loading speed on mobile becomes a factor of positioning. This change, not only favors the pages faster but that will negatively affect the ranking of the pages slower.

How fast can a website for SEO?

Obviously, the faster the website, the better. But, having a few goals we can help in the optimization process. Google gives us some clues about what are the best practices related with the speed of a site. We must take into account four elements:

• The content it should show up in less than 3 seconds.
• The first byte you must load in less than 1.3 seconds.
• The number of requests must be less than 50
• The page weight must be less than 500KB

But what is certain is that today, most of the sites do not meet these requirements.

How can you improve the speed of a site?

Once we know what our goals are to improve the speed of the web we must know what items you can improve.

In the following listing we explain the optimizations are most common.

1. Images: The optimization of the images it is essential to improve the speed of the site. Must be optimised in weight, size and in resolution. For example, in mobile do not need to use images as large as on desktop, so which should be tailored to the size of the main devices to provide the corresponding image in each case.
   The same thing happens with the weight, the images must weigh as little as possible, the only limit will be the evident loss of quality. Currently, there are formats of images of new generation (for example, WebP or JPG2000), which allow a reduction of up to 50% of the weight of the image with a loss of minimum quality. The problem with these formats is that not all browsers supporting.
2. Lazy Loading, or Load in deferred: the user can view the content in less than 1 second it is very difficult if the page is loaded all at once. The load on deferred makes it possible to render the content of the first half of the screen, so that the user can receive information as soon as possible, the rest of the page will render while the user interacts with the web. For example, they are loading the contents of the first scroll first, which is what the user will see in the first second.
3. Remove the code that is not in use: keep the code of the web clean will help the pages to weigh less. So to review and remove items that are no longer used can be very useful. In the case of content management systems like wordpress, a good practice is to remove the pluggins that are not in use.
4. Requests for external resources: you should minimize the number of external requests, as discussed in the previous point, we need to make sure that you only include those petitions that we need.
5. Defer the loading of resources that are not critical: at the time of making requests to the resource as it can be JS or CSS of our website, it is important that you only load in the first time the critical resources, i.e., those that are necessary for the website to work properly from the beginning. It is even advisable to inline the JS and CSS critical to reduce the number of requests.
6. Set the cache in the browser efficiently: the cache allows the page to be served faster when a recurring user visits the site again.

In most cases, it will be necessary for the technical department to implement these improvements. Though you should be aware that currently the major content management systems, like WordPress, already have pluggins that allow you to optimize these elements.

PageSpeed Test

It is the tool that Google puts at our disposal to detect improvements in the speed of the web.

PageSpeed used lighthouse to analyze the content of the website and give suggestions to improve the speed. The tool a score to the web, both on mobile as on desktop, you can:

• under 49 (red) → Web slow
• 50 – 90 (orange) → Normal
• 90 – 100 (green) → Fast

Other tools speed analysis

others of PageSpeed, it is advisable to analyze the speed of the site using other tools that can give us more information, such as, for example:

• Webpagetest
• Pingdom

Both perform a detailed analysis on what elements should be optimized, what elements of the web weigh more, which made more requests, etc

There is No doubt that in order to have a web healthy, it is necessary to take care of her level of speed, since it not only affects the search engines but also to the engagement of your potential customers, to the shopping experience and the usability of your site. Having a fast web can make all the difference to your competitors.