5 ways to speed up the loading speed of your web page

The loading speed of a web is one of the crucial aspects nowadays for factors as important as the positioning in search engines. If a company shows a web page that takes a long time to load, it has a severe problem. Google does not tolerate this slowness, but users do not either.

Most customers are used to the immediate things and get the content or information they were looking for as quickly as possible. For this reason, looking for ways to speed up the loading speed of a website is something to consider seriously.

So that a user does not abandon a web page which results in lost sales and even potential customers, it is necessary to find ways to optimize web pages. Many factors influence the loading speed of a website and make it slow. But in the same way, there are also many ways to deal with this problem and improve the speed of the page and, therefore, its positioning.

Below we analyze some of the tools and give you several tips that will help you to get an adequate web page, optimized and that meets the demands of your users to offer them the best possible experience with your brand.

Tools to analyze the loading speed of a web

Before getting down to work, it is essential that you know entirely what is the situation in which your website is located, that is, how long it takes to load precisely. These data can only be obtained through different tools that Google or other providers put at your disposal. Currently, these are the primary tools that can help you analyze the loading speed of a web:

1.- Pingdom Tools

This tool is a reference regarding website analysis. Pingdom analyzes the weight that each element of your web page may have to generate a report in the form of a colored waterfall. In this way, you can easily see which of the elements of your website make it go slower.

With the help of this tool, you will get all the possible information on technical aspects that affect the loading speed of your website as:

• A check of HTTP and HTTP (S).
• Analysis of the state of the public page.
• IPv6
• SMTP, POP3, IMAP-
• TCP, Ping, DNS, UDP.

2.- Google Analytics

On the other hand, using Google Analytics, you will be able to track the load times of your specific web page.

This tool shows you different diagrams that identify the main problems you will have to face regarding the speed of downloading a website, both in desktop environments and from mobile devices, one of the aspects that you must take care of today.

3.- Woorank

Woorank is an easy-to-use tool that measures the loading speed of different web pages, even from mobile devices.

Also, you can also perform a more extensive and complete analysis of the website analyzing aspects as varied as:

• Keyword tracking
• Monitoring of the operative time of the site.
• Analysis of backlinks.

5 tips to improve download speed

Once you know the real state of your web page, it’s time to get down to work and try to improve its functioning. For this you must pay special attention in the following 5 aspects:

1.- Quality of the server

A bad server makes the website take a long time to load. Therefore, it is essential to get a good server for this process to be as fast as possible.

The communication process of the client with the server is complex: since the client launches the query from the browser until the response is obtained from the server, a time passes that depends on whether this information is propagated correctly and that the transcript is also correct. The better the server is, the shorter this time period will be.

Once this temporary space has elapsed, the client receives the reply from the server with the information that has that associated address. This process is repeated for each element that has to be loaded, although the waiting times are longer in the first communication than in the following ones.

Generally, your website will be hosted on servers usually shared by other users which makes them load slower. While private servers are faster, they are also much more expensive. A good option is the VPS – Private Virtual Server -where the management of the resources of a physical server is done as if it had several servers inside it.

It is also recommended that if you want to position the website in a specific country, the chosen server is in that country to facilitate waiting times as short as possible.

2.- Compress the web page

When a file is compressed as a zip file on the computer, the size of this file is reduced, and the same thing happens with Gzip that works on the data that are found on a web page. If you install Gzip, the website’s files are automatically compressed as Gzip files, saving you bandwidth and accelerating the loading of the page. When the user accesses the site, the browser also decompresses the data automatically, and the content is displayed.

The installation of Gzip is simple, and the increase in speed is significant. Gzip can be installed manually through a file that is located in the root directory of your server. Also, some plugins add Gzip with a click.

3.- Optimize the images

When designing the web page, you must indicate the dimensions of the images to the browser. Otherwise, the page will “build” first with the text and then start loading the images. When the dimensions of the image are specified, the browser knows the size first and uses the information to shape the page without having to reconstruct it.

Also, the images occupy a large part of the bandwidth in the websites. Therefore, it is essential to optimize and compress them. It seems obvious but in most of the web pages this data is overlooked, and that is fundamental to achieve an adequate loading speed of the web.

There are numerous tools to optimize the images. The best known is Photoshop although any of them will be valid to reduce the size and weight of your pictures.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that you should avoid including images that are not strictly necessary. In this way, you will be able to keep the website below 400 Kb so that it is not too heavy. Regarding the format, it is usually recommended to save the images in JPG format since they will weigh a little less but will continue to maintain the necessary quality.

4.- Beware of WordPress plugins

Another good practice to improve the loading speed of a web page is to identify the WordPress plugins that affect performance and slow down the loading time of the page. The more plugins you have, the slower the speed.

Also, keep in mind that most of the plugins that add additional size are the social plugins in which content is shared. Each website is different, and each plugin can affect you differently.

For this reason, the most convenient is to try different plugins and see which is best suited to your page.

However, one of the advantages of WordPress is that there are plugins for almost any need. When optimizing the loading speed of a website you should use the following plugins:

• P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), or any other diagnostic plugin that analyzes your site and shows you the impact of the plugins installed in the loading time of the page.
• WP Super Cache or another cache plugin that improves the loading speed when generating static Html files.

5.- Avoid syntax errors and broken links

This last point is fundamental. In addition to confirming that there are no syntactic errors in the web code, it is also vital that there are no broken links or broken SRC tags. These errors would cause many requests to the server, thus increasing the waiting time and excessive consumption of data transfer.

Therefore, you must maintain a right syntax and avoid broken links, because besides that your user will appreciate it, it will also help to improve the loading speed of your web page.

These are five tips that can help you speed up the loading speed of your web page. However, when you have made some changes, it is advisable to test in the private or incognito mode of your browser because, in this way, you will get a test as close to the reality of how the loading speed of your website changes.

In Antevenio Go! We use innovative and quality technology to improve the conversion of your landing pages. We focus on the behavior of users depending on the source of recruitment that this user comes from and we put all our services at your disposal to optimize the conversion rate.