The following is an article “4 Ways to Improve Site Speed” by Marc Primo.
Site speed is vital in every digital marketing effort as it plays a pivotal role in user experience. It affects your SEO, paid searches, paid socials, and bounce rate which gives you more focus on certain areas to improve on. While there are many tools to audit your site speeds, most are not really comprehensive enough to give you the proper insight on how to increase site speeds and user experience. Fortunately, there are some things you can try that can make a difference.
For digital newbies, site speed is simply the rate by which users can quickly see your content and interact with your website. Since 2018, Google has shifted to the mobile-first index which means that your mobile content is the first to be audited rather than the Desktop version. With this, your mobile SEO content plays a vital role in how you can improve your site speeds and make sure your customers can reach you fast when they pay your site a visit.
Below are four novel ideas that you can’t see in most auditing tools that can help you improve on your site speeds.
Image optimization
Most digital marketing content providers are now utilizing SVG images which are vector-based rather than PNG images which can save up to 60% of your file size. SVGs are smaller and therefore more appropriate for icons and minimize site speed audit detection. If you have to use larger SVG files, you might also want to consider compression tools such as SVGMinify or Vecta.io which make the files smaller without sacrificing quality.
After you have compressed your SVG images, you can now focus on how you can deliver them efficiently. Inlining images in HTML rather than using CSS or JavaScript can be more efficient and take a lesser toll on your site speed. This also streamlines your time by minimizing server turnarounds giving your users faster speeds in accessing your content.
Less JavaScript and more HTML
JavaScript uses more download and server turnaround time so if you can inline SVG images in HTML then why opt for JavaScript? While it does give you higher functionality, when considering site speed performance, HTML through time have both improved in speed and functionality. Rather than using dropdown search options in your user interface in JavaSCript, you can now try the HTML datalist element tool that’s also available for mobile devices functionality. It’s faster and requires less work for you plus you can use the other new HTML functions such as “summary” and “details” built-in tags however you see fit.
Tune up your Network
As previously mentioned, the greatest aspect wherein you can improve your site speeds is cutting back on server turnaround times and tuning up your network manually can do a lot if you’re bent on increasing your site speeds. TLS 3.1 otherwise known as SSL is an encryption feature in HTTPS which you can discuss with your tech team in how they can reduce turnarounds from two back and forths to the server to just one or better yet, just use a content delivery network.
You may also improve your site speeds by using the new QUIC + HTTP/3 to optimize browser to server communications which you can take advantage of if you are a CloudFlare user. CloudFlare is a website security provider that improves your web content delivery via distributed domain name server services.
Maximize your CSS
Aside from HTML, using CSS can also improve your site speeds by reusing images, utilizing navigation elements, and opting for its animation functions. Coding your site in a way that reroutes images in CSS via the “transform” functionality will give you lesser browser to server turnarounds for faster user interaction speeds. You can now also code in menus and tabs on CSS and faster animation features than that of JavaScript that runs in the native code of your operating system. Arguably, CSS allows you to optimize the use of your image files adding more appeal to your content that’s even better than what JavaScript can offer and at faster turnaround speeds.
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