Page Load Performance
There are a few ways to reduce the time it takes your page to load. For example, you should compress your images, minify/gzip your files, take advantage of caching files, and aim to avoid “heavy” scripts. There are ways to automate a lot of these things. For example, if you are using a static site generator like Gatsby there are plugins that take care of optimizing images for you before the site gets built, whenever you publish a new page.
If you are interested in how your tech stack can help your pages run faster and rank better on search engines we recommend checking out our course on “Building a Content Marketing Engine”. In it, we are talking about static site generators, headless CMSs, and plugins that improve your page performance.
Scripts
Try to load as little JavaScript as possible on each page. If your site relies heavily on JavaScript to load content, you may want to implement server-side rendering (be aware you might need help from a software developer for this).
Images
Compress all your images to the smallest file size possible without compromising user experience. There are many free services for this like TinyPNG or ImageOptim which can compress an image for you. When possible, use .svg files, which allow for very small file sizes.
gzipping
All the frontend files that users need to access your websites should be compressed and gzipped. This reduces the download size and improves page load speed. This may require help from your engineering team, but here’s an article that explains the process.
Caching
By caching files on your website (especially large files like images and stylesheets) users who have visited before don’t need to load every asset everytime they load your site.
Loading from CDNs
Load as many files as you can from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs are distributed groups of servers that provide very fast delivery of files (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, videos, etc.) by caching the files closer to end users. They also provide a level of redundancy such that if your primary server is temporarily down, the cached files in your CDN might allow you to continue showing content to users.