Having a slow website is not only a bad experience for visitors, it is also a problem if our goal is for Google to recommend us in its search engine.
The speed of access to a website, mainly from mobile devices, has become a key piece of the SEO world, and every “webmaster” must worry and move to ensure that their content is loaded worldwide in a few seconds, otherwise we will see how visits will fall and visitors will end up abandoning our site.
Tools at our fingertips
Today there are many tools that we can use to verify the reasons for the slowness of our page. From the use of pingdom to Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool, they offer adequate information to know if the problem is with the server configuration, with the network, with our website, with some “virus”… there can be many causes, and it is necessary to know the most immediate solutions:
1 – Install some cache system on our pages
Regardless of the CMS we use, it is important to use some cache system so that the pages load quickly for visitors. The cache shows the same content for everyone, reads the page once, creates static HTML content and offers it agilely without having to access the database constantly every time a visitor requests it.
In the case of WordPress, some plugins have become very famous, even the company Automattic, responsible for WordPress, bought one of them, the WP-SuperCache, although depending on the application you have, and the type of content, it is usually recommended to use one or the other.
It is also important to talk to the hosting service so that it applies the corresponding cache at the server level. The more the hosting service knows the application you have in hand, the better the result will be.
2 – Use a CDN
There are platforms that are responsible for obtaining our content, that of our server, and replicate it on several machines distributed throughout the planet. Cloudfare is one of the most famous, responsible precisely for increasing the speed and security of our sites.
The operation is very simple: we indicate the url that we want to pass through its servers and we change the DNS to point to the contracted CDN. Once this is done, Cloudfare, or whatever CDN it is, will be responsible for obtaining the content from our server to replicate it in different countries.
The advantage is that a visitor from the other side of the world will access in this way the closest server of the CDN, without having to reach the original server where we have the hosting.
Using a CDN can also be useful to block DDos attacks, cancel requests by countries, compress JS or CSS content, and much more.
3 – Optimize the application
Most of the time the slowness problem is found in our application. It is important, in the case of being a WordPress, to use a fast theme, that does not use many JS files or many CSS, that is designed for mobile access and that does not have millions of conditionals inside. A fast and personalized theme is usually the best option, always monitoring with Google’s Pagespeed to verify if the code meets all the requirements.
4 – Use AMP
In the case of content that is consumed from the mobile, using AMP pages is a good idea. Although it is a format still little mature, it has been shown that Google loves it, so it will position the pages more quickly.
The AMP pages created will be saved by Google on its servers, so when a user consults them, it will not load our server, it will use Google’s CDN to retrieve the existing content in its cache.
The problem occurs with pages whose content changes constantly, but if your content is static, it is a very good option.
5 – Reduce the size of the images
Use compressors, the webp format, pages like tinypng, plugins that optimize the size… any tool that helps to avoid putting 400kb images on the web if it can be put 30kn without practically losing quality.
A heavy image can occupy more space than the entire page, and will end up affecting the user experience, who may be more interested in reading the text than in seeing the image that illustrates it.
If you use a photo editor, verify the option to “save in web format” and adjust the compression percentage so that the result is as small as possible.
It is not easy to get the web to be fast, there are many more factors that can affect, such as the security certificate, the latency, the type of server contracted… what is important is to know the factors and seek help when one of them goes out of the average, and act quickly when we see that the problem is causing us to lose customers.
Remember that the web world is increasingly mobile world, and that the aesthetics of the sites has less and less importance, what is really relevant is that it is easy to read, informative, comfortable and practical.
And in the near future?
And while webdesigners tear their hair out to see how creativity is limited by this trend of speed, operators promise 5G connections in a very short time, connections that can load tiny pages loaded in CDN, with AMP format so that the visitor does not have to wait even half a second to read what he wants so much.
