If you thought dealing with website speed optimization could be kept on the back burner, think again.
Website speed and performance matter more than what SEOs make them out to be.
Let me ask you this: What do you do when you click on a website, but it just keeps loading and never opens?
Personally, I click back, shake the dust off my feet, and never return. Guess what? That’s a shared experience among all users across all industries. Because let’s face it, a slow load time is a deal breaker.
That brief waiting time tells users everything about a website—its professionalism, attention to user experience, and even how much the brand values their time.
In a digital world, speed = trust. If your website drags its feet, visitors assume the rest of the experience will too.
Thankfully, website speed optimization doesn’t require a big overhaul to see real improvements. A few strategic tweaks are enough to shave seconds off your load time, boosting page load speed.
That’s what we’re here to discuss today.
Why is Page Speed Important?
Page speed is not just a technical SEO metric. It directly impacts how users interact with your site, influencing whether they decide to stick around or bounce right off.
But there’s more to optimizing load time than just boosting user experience. A faster website also encourages visitors to take your desired action, whatever the case may be.
Let’s explore three key reasons page speed (or the lack thereof!) can make or break your business.
Reason #1: Faster site speed results in more conversions
In 2020, Yelp introduced new features that gave advertisers more control over their ad campaigns. But these changes came at the cost of slow load times. To be exact, load time went from 3 seconds to 6 seconds.
After some website speed testing, Yelp made the page load faster by 1 second and already saw a 12% boost in conversion rates. With this in mind, the dev team implemented improvements on the first contentful paint (the time it took for the page to render) and time to interactive (the time it takes for the page to render fully and become usable).
After four months, they optimized their FCP to load from 3.25 seconds to 1.80 seconds and TTI from 4.31 seconds to 3.21 seconds. Yelp saw its conversion rate boost by 15% after this minor tweak.
Reason #2: Slow loading speed leads to higher bounce rates
In a study of 11 million mobile landing pages across 213 countries, Google found a major trend: mobile sites were still too slow, despite most users having 4G connections.
In fact, 70% of these pages took over 5 seconds just to load the visible content.
To dig deeper, Google trained a neural network (that accurately replicates human behavior 90% of the time) to understand how load speed affects user behavior. It found that when the page loading process increased from 1 to 10 seconds, the bounce rate potentially shot up to 123%.
The takeaway? Speed matters not just for your browser but also for mobile devices.
If your site lags, users won’t stick around and leave before it even finishes loading.
Reason #3: Speedier website performance lowers cart abandonment rate
When you fire up your browser and visit an online store, nothing feels better than seeing the product you want immediately. Personally, when that happens, my user experience meter gets dialed to 10,000.
Agrofy discovered the same thing.
In the past, it took a significant time before users saw the main image on Agrofy’s website. By significant time, we mean only a few seconds more than ideal. But this extra few seconds meant a 3.8% abandonment rate among users.
To fix this, the Agrofy focused on optimizing their Core Web Vitals, specifically:
- First contentful paint (FCP)
- Largest contentful paint (LCP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
In addition, they also used a CDN for static website content and implemented server-side rendering to ensure critical content is displayed as soon as users visit the web page.
These minor tweaks on their website resulted in a 76% reduction in cart abandonment rate, as shown below:
To summarize the above stories, speeding up your site translates way beyond a better user experience and improved SEO performance. It can also result in higher conversion rates that serve your bottom line.
The golden question is: What are the best website speed optimization strategies to improve website performance? We’ll look at 8 below.
8 Strategies for Website Speed Optimization for a Blazing-Fast SEO-Friendly Site
1. Use Efficient Web Hosting
Web hosting comes first because it is the most crucial. Think about it. No amount of tweaking your Core Web Vitals will help if your hosting provider bottlenecks your site’s performance.
One of the biggest decisions you’ll face is choosing (or shifting) between the types of web hosting:
- Shared hosting
- Virtual Private Server
- Dedicated hosting
Shared hosting is obviously the most budget-friendly because you’re splitting resources with countless other websites. Is it enough? Sure, if you’re only receiving modest traffic. But as your site grows and traffic starts coming in, you might want to transition to VPS or dedicated hosting.
VPS is a good middle ground, providing you with a dedicated portion of your server’s resources. This means it won’t cause performance dips during traffic spikes.
But if you need it, dedicated hosting gives an entire server to yourself. Great for sites that receive high web traffic. If that’s you, a change of hosting service might do you wonders.
Beyond hosting type, consider the following as well:
- The geographic location of the servers (closer to your audience is better)
- The quality of the hardware (modern SSDs and powerful CPUs are preferred)
- The speed and reliability of the hosting provider’s network
You can find this information through hosting provider specifications, user reviews, or independent speed tests.
Ultimately, upgrading to a host with a proven quick average response time will pay dividends in faster page loads, happier visitors, and better SEO.
2. Optimize and Compress Images
Images can be double-edged swords to a website. On one end, they make your site more appealing. On the other hand, they also make up the bulk of your page’s file size, which can slow down its performance.
As such, optimizing and compressing them is necessary to ensure faster loading times.
First, choose the right format—JPEG or WebP for photos and PNG for transparent graphics. Next, compress images to reduce file size. WebP, in particular, offers better compression without losing so much quality.
Many online tools offer free solutions for compressing images, including ImageOptim and TinyPNG.
Finally, implement lazy loading to enhance “perceived speed” by only loading images when they come into the user’s view. The graphic below perfectly illustrates how lazy loading works:
Just make sure to execute this strategy effectively to improve performance and avoid any SEO issues.
3. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Minification means stripping out all unnecessary characters in your CSS and JavaScript files, like spaces, line breaks, and comments. While these characters don’t necessarily affect how the code runs, they add extra weight for browsers to download and process. Ultimately, this slows down your site.
By minifying, you remove these elements without changing how the code functions, speeding up page rendering. HTML can also benefit from some sprucing up, although the size savings aren’t that huge compared to JS/CSS.
Additionally, you might want to look into the plugins you’re using on your WordPress website. Some plugins load additional JavaScript and CSS files, and even slow down your time to first byte. It’s a good practice to remove plugins you no longer use for a leaner, faster-loading website.
4. Use a Lightweight Theme or Framework
Some themes are bloated with unnecessary scripts and heavy design elements that can seriously drag down your site speed.
You don’t even have to try the theme out to know if it’s heavy. Just copy the demo page and test it using PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
If the demo loads slowly, has a high number of requests, or triggers warnings like “Eliminate render-blocking resources” or “Reduce unused JavaScript,” that’s your red flag.
For example, here is a screenshot of Google PageSpeed Insights for a website:
Also, pay attention to the features advertised.
Themes that promise everything, such as sliders, animations, bundled plugins, and page builders, often come with a trade-off: reduced performance.
These extras look flashy, but they are gold-plated rocks. They likely load tons of JS and CSS files that can potentially slow your website.
Check the reviews, too! Multiple users complaining about speed or performance issues is all the barometer you need. Instead, opt for themes that are known for being lightweight and well-coded.
5. Enable Browser Caching
Caching instructs the browsers of site visitors to save certain files, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, for a set period. This way, when they return to your site or visit other pages, their browser won’t have to redownload those resources and can simply load the cached version of your site on their own device.
The result? Faster page loads and lower server load.
Enabling browser caching depends on your specific circumstances. If you’re technically inclined, you may configure your web server. Otherwise, simply use caching plugins for websites built on CMS like WordPress.
Proper caching settings specify how long browsers should keep files before fetching fresh versions. This reduces the number of HTTP requests, speeds up user experience, and boosts your SEO by lowering load times.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a network of servers spread out across the globe. When someone visits your website, the CDN server closest to that user delivers all your site’s content, like images, videos, and code files. This reduces the distance data has to travel, making your pages load much faster.
Now, you might wonder: if I have a dedicated server (as in suggestion #1), do I still need a CDN? Well, that depends.
While dedicated hosting gives you more power and resources, that server is typically located in one place only. This can still drag load times if the visitor is from the opposite side of the world.
Meanwhile, a CDN has many global servers, allowing the closest server to deliver your content to nearby visitors. Moreover, CDNs store copies of static files on their server, so your main server doesn’t have to work as hard, especially during high-traffic seasons.
If you’re engaged in international SEO with audiences spread out across countries, a CDN can be useful. Otherwise, just choose a hosting provider with servers closest to your market.
7. Limit HTTP Requests
Every HTTP request is a round-trip ticket from a visitor’s browser to your server. Imagine if you own a content-heavy website. All images, stylesheet, Java, fonts, icons, and more are individual HTTP requests for data from the server. More requests mean a longer time to load.
To limit HTTP requests, there are several strategies for a faster website response:
- Combine CSS and JavaScript files where possible to cut down multiple requests into one
- Use CSS sprites to group small images (like icons) into one single file
- Implement lazy load on visual content, so requests are sent only when needed and not all at once
- Inline critical CSS for above-the-fold content to reduce the need to load external files immediately
You can easily view your website’s request count using tools like Google Lighthouse, GTmetrix, and Pingdom. Ideally, try to keep requests below 100 per page because less is better for performance.
Speaking of testing…
8. Regularly Audit with Page Speed Tools
As the adage goes, “prevention is better than cure.” That is why running regular audits using page speed tools is critical to maintaining a fast, SEO-friendly website.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze how your pages perform and highlight specific bottlenecks. This tool doesn’t skimp on informing you about speed metrics holding your site back, and giving actionable recommendations to fix the slow website.
Look at the screenshot below of a website’s speed metrics found under the Core Web Vitals metrics:
Clicking the dropdown reveals Google’s dedicated resource on how to fix the specific issue.
Plus, even if you’re not tech-savvy, most tools use color-coded scores (red for bad, yellow for intermediate, and green for good) and clear labels (“Reduce the impact of third-party codet” or “Enable Text Compression“) for appropriate action.
Make it a habit to run these tests monthly or after major changes like theme updates, plugin installs, or content overhauls. By staying proactive, you can spot slowdowns before they affect SEO rankings or frustrate users.
Low Page Load Time = Better SEO
You’ve heard this before, and I’ll say it once more for good measure: “In today’s business landscape, speed isn’t just a luxury, it’s a necessity.” And it holds!
For one, website speed isn’t just a technical detail but a ranking factor for SEO.Secondly, it is crucial for ensuring site visitors get the best experience on your website. Finally, as countless case studies have shown, site speed also influences conversion rate, which can serve your business goals.
All of this makes the case for website speed optimization.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a developer to create a blazing-fast site. You can do so much improvement just by starting with the basics: upgrade your hosting, compress images, enable browser caching, and regularly audit your site.
Each tip in this guide builds on the last one, and together, they make a measurable impact.
So, ready to supercharge your website’s speed?