Last Updated on June 19, 2023 by Subhash Jain

Website speed is a key parameter for your business success because it directly influences search engine rankings, leads generation, conversion rates, and repeat business. Google also considers website speed as a ranking signal. Almost 79% of consumers are less likely to buy from that site again because of only the poor website performance. If you too feel your business lagging behind competitors resulting in a considerable drop in revenue and profitability, your website speed may be the hidden culprit that increases the bounce rate and drops the product visibility. So, what is the solution?

“We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Using site speed in web search ranking – Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

This blog shares helpful insights and result-delivering tips to help you speed up your business website to stay competitive by delivering the ultimate user experience (UX) in line with the latest ranking algorithms.

Setting Performance Budgets

The Performance budget is a suite of defined limits for key metrics that affect website site performance. It is a tradeoff between UX and performance indicators. Some examples of performance budget are- ‘The log must score less than 80 on Lighthouse performance audits’; ‘page on desktop must have less than 2 MB of images’, or ‘the product page must carry JavaScript less than 150 KB while appearing on mobile’. So, how will you set performance budget? The following tips may help you maximize website performance by minimizing auto-generated regressions during changes made-

Use of Lighthouse Bot to Define a Performance Budget

The open-source Lighthouse Bot assures that you wouldn’t downgrade the website performance accidentally without being informed. When you configure your repository, it doesn’t allow you merging pull-requests if the Lighthouse scores go below the set parameter like (e.g.

Use of Lighthouse CI for Performance Monitoring

Lighthouse CI is a set of free tools developed for quick web performance Optimization by using Lighthouse for real-time performance monitoring during integration. Lighthouse report provides insights about a webpage performance; Lighthouse CI provides insights about how the performance metrics changed during the run time.

Image Optimization

Image optimization improves UX, leads, and conversion rate, as well as, it improves the website quality from an SEO perspective. Optimizing website images is the simplest way to keep the website load time at minimum as possible. Following tips for image optimization may help you improve website speed and overall performance-

Choose The Right Image Format

Eliminating the image resource is the best image optimization strategy. Under the Vector graphics strategy, you use points, lines, and polygons for image presentation. Under the Raster graphics strategy, an image is represented by encoding individual values of each pixel of a rectangular grid. Each format has its own set of pros and cons. Vector format is an ideal choice for the images created with simple geometric shapes. The raster image format is good for representing complex images. The following tips for image optimization will help you improve the website speed.

Optimize The Compression Level

The image compression includes optimization of vector images, compression of SVG assets, optimizing settings for raster formats, removal of un-required image metadata, resizing images etc. Developed by NPM, Inc. (Acquired by GitHub in 2020), Imagemin is an excellent tool for image compression to improve visual appeal, UX. and website speed.

Replace Animated Gifs with Video

Replacement of long-size GIFs with MPEG videos saves big space on users-side bandwidth

Serve Responsive Images

Use of different images with correct dimensions, optimized for different devices, speeds up the website.

Use Webp Images

WebP images consume 25–35% smaller spaces than traditional JPEG and PNG images. For example, YouTube succeeded in 10% speed increase by using WebP thumbnails.

What is Webp?

WebP, an open-source advanced image format provides superior compression for images on the website.

Use Image CDNs

It is an excellent way to minimize the size of image files. An image CDN can reduce the size of an image file by 40–80%. According to Pingdom, images on a website contribute over 60% of the download size of a web page.

Lazy-Loading for Images and Videos

Lazy loading is a website performance optimization strategy structured to identify non-blocking (non-critical) resources including images and load these resources only when these are required. Lazy-loading of images and videos considerably reduce resource usage, page weight, and page loading time. It improves user’s experience because the requested content is delivered much faster than before. Go through the following tips forlazy-loading of images and videos-

Browser-Level Lazy-Loading

Almost all the Chromium-powered browsers support “” to defer the uploading of off-screen images.

Use of Lazysizes to Lazy-Load Images

Written in VanillaJS, ‘Lazysizes’ is a self-initializing image lazyloader that loads images (including responsive images), scripts (widgets), and iframes intelligently as per user’s intentions and behavior.

Optimize JavaScript

According to Kissmetrics, almost 47 percent of visitors leave a business website or app if its loading time is more than 3 seconds. Surely, you wouldn’t like even a single potential buyer drifting to other resources just because of the website or app speed. To help you address this issue effectively, here I share  five tips for JS optimization to improve your website performance:

Apply Instant Loading with the PRPL Pattern

PRPL (Push, Render, Pre-cache, Lazy load) defines a roadmap to faster web page loading and interaction.

Use Code-Splitting to Reduce Javascript Payload

Splitting of JavaScript bundle to send only the needed code for initial application loading reduces the page load time. Removing unused code is also a good strategy to improve website speed.

Compress The Minimized Network Payloads

Minification and data compression are effective techniques for minimizing payload.

Use Modern Code

The use of customized codes for different modern browsers improves the user experience because of faster page speed.

Commonjs Makes The Bundles Bigger

Instead of using CommonJS modules, the use of ECMAScript module syntax also called ESM is a good practice to increase the website speed.

Optimize Delivery of Resources

This trick will help you reduce the distance travelled by data requests between browsers and the host’s servers. Loading the website from a server close to visitors make them experience impressive website speed. Here I share five tips to optimize the delivery of resources for website speed improvement-

Use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

The objective of using a CDN is to help website visitors (located far from your server) receive the website content faster.CDNs improve website speed because of using a distributed servers’ network. In addition, CDN helps to manage traffic spikes. Therefore, CDN usage improves UX, reduces bounce rate, and boosts website performance.

Prioritize Resources

Setting the priorities in the browser improves loading performance as it fixes the relative importance of each resource.

Preloading of Critical Assets

Preloading of identified resources that are recognized by the browsers late is an effective strategy to speed up the webpage.

Improve Network Connections

Fast establishment of network connections improves the user experience because of faster webpage speed.

‘rel=prefetch’ Improves Navigation Experience

The ‘rel=prefetch’ added to webpage tells the browsers to download the particular pages or some resources that most of the users navigate; it results in improved navigation experience.

CSS Optimization

Your browser halts other browser downloads and processing when it encounters a tag to fetch and parse the CSS file. The larger stylesheet takes more time to download and processing into a CSS Object Model (CSSOM). Also, it is difficult to identify abandoned styles. Here comes the importance of CSS optimization. These effective tips will help you for CSS optimization-

Defer Non-Critical CSS

CSS files should be processed before the browser starts rendering the webpage to improve FCP.

Minimize CSS Files

Optimize critical rendering to improve FCP. The Performance section at Lighthouse report displays ‘Eliminate render-blocking resources’.

Extract Critical CSS

It extracts CSS for above-the-fold content to render it as fast as possible. Inlining extracted styles in

of HTML documents eliminates the additional request process to fetch these styles.

Optimized CSS Background Images

The use of media queries for sending responsive images increases the website’s loading speed.

“According to the 2021 Web Almanac report, “94.1% of desktop sites and 94.4% of mobile sites use at least one 3rd-party resource.”

Third Party Resource Optimization

Embedding a 3^rd party library or service may improve productivity but it can affect performance also. JavaScripts often slow down the webpage loading speed.Identification of slow 3rd party JavaScript affecting website speed can be done by Lighthouse and Chrome DevTools optimization.

Web Fonts Optimization

A “full” WebFont t includes numbers of stylistic variants and glyphs which are not required but contribute to unnecessary multi-megabyte downloads. The @font-face CSS rule helps you split the font family into a set of resources. Following the set directions, browser identifies the required variants and subsets to download the minimal set and render the text faster. The resource prioritization is a great support for webmasters to optimize typography.

Network Quality Optimization

The website loading experience can be different depending on the particular network conditions. A website may seem loading fast and smooth on a fast network but the story may be different when users use limited data plan, spotty connections, slow Wi-Fi. The Network Information API enables web applications to access the quality of the user’s network and acts accordingly to load the high-definition or low-definition content.

Performance Measurement

CrUX is a user-experience assessment report based on Core Web Vitals metrics- LCP, FID, and CLS. CrUX Dashboard and PageSpeed Insights are the best tools to create Chrome UX Report and optimize website performance. Use of Chrome UX Report on Data Studio, PageSpeed Insights, and BigQuery provides insights to improve webpage speed. Chrome UX Report API is the latest arrival to optimize the page loads for improved speed.

Building a Performance Culture

Website performance is not only about understanding the ways to make it fast. Website performance culture creates awareness amongst developers and other business stakeholders. Performance is a feature that needs consistent optimization according to changing conditions. To scale the achievement by consistent improvement, Google introduced ‘Relative Mobile Conversion Rate metric (Rel mCvR)’ in 2019. The best strategy to achieve maximum conversion evolves around discover, engage, convert, and re-engage by using FCP, FMP, and FID metrics. Conducting A/B test is also a good practice to get insights about changes occurred after making improvements at different verticals. Tools like Squoosh, DevTools code coverage, Critical etc also help to speed up the web pages for delivering the ultimate user-experience.

Pro-tip:

Going a step ahead to others, you can use Expires Headers also to help browsers to assess whether they should download the requested resource remotely (from the website’s server) or they should load the requested resource from the local cache. ‘Expires headers’ are HTTP page headers. Use of expires headers faster your website for returning visitors.

About Author:

Subhash Jain is the Founder of Samyak Online – the top website design agency in India. Contact us for your website better performance and speed to get higher rankings and conversion.

The post 10+ Tips to Improve Website Speed for the Ultimate UX in A Smart Way appeared first on 2023.