📝 How to Increase Blog Page Speed
The blog article you wrote is rich in research and captivates the reader. But what if it is taking forever (or more than 4 seconds to be precise) to load on a screen? Sadly, your blog page is destined to get a low rank in Google search results if it taking the recommended load time, no matter how well written it is. In this article, we take you through everything you need to know on how to make a blog post faster. Increasing the blog post speed not only help you rank better on Google results, but also enhance the user experience on your website.
How to check the page speed?
The best place to test the page speed is right from the giant itself. Google Page Speed Insights give you a detailed breakdown on the areas your page is performing well and the areas where you need to improve on. Speed metrics such as First Contentful Paint, Speed Index and Total Blocking Time are calculated to provide a page speed ‘score’. These metrics have a unique function to analyze each component of a webpage from which the page load time can be calculated.
Factors affecting page speed
Many factors affect the load time of a web page. To make the blog post faster, we need to be on top of these parameters to rank with a high page speed score. Optimizing the page not only help it rank better with Google, but it also helps the user to interact with the web page in a better way. So, what do you need to do to increase blog post speed?
What are the key steps to follow if you want to increase the blog post speed?
1. Perform well on Core Web Vitals
Although core web vitals are not directly linked to specific page speed metrics, it has a contributory overarching effect on the page rank. And, among many other factors, one main element in determining that rank is the page speed. Generally speaking, Google sets a pre-defined standard for the page to determine the quality of the experience visitors gets when interacting with a web page. This is known as core web vitals.
2. First Contentful Paint (FCP)
FCP is the first set of content that reports back to the user responding that the page is loading. The system will know that the page is loading when the first contentful paint completes.
3. Follow Google Guidelines
It has been a long-established Google guideline that site speed is one of the most commonly used methods by its algorithm to rank pages. The primary reason is that most of us humans get frustrated with slow pages and are likely to hit the back button if the page is not responding. Google intends to improve the internet experience of all users.
Research suggests that Google is measuring the time it takes to consider the first-page information. A slow page speed results in the search engine crawling fewer pages from their established crawl targets. Having bots scroll less pages is fatal for a growing website as it could negatively affect the site’s indexing criteria.
4. Compress Files for Faster Loading Times
Reducing the size of CSS, HTML and JavaScript files can boost page load times. Typically, compression should be done if a particular file is larger than 150 bytes. A good tool to compress large files is GZip, although it is not advisable to reduce the size of images with this software. If you want more information about file compression with GZip, we found a really good article on Better Explained on how to optimize your site with GZip compression. To reduce the size of large image files, you could use a photo editor such as Photoshop or even the Windows photo editor.
5. Limit Redirects
Redirecting the site results in the server taking a longer than normal time to find the correct retrievable. Therefore, it is best to avoid unnecessary redirects whenever possible to reduce slow page load times.
6. Utilize Browser Cache Smartly
A browser cache generally refers to the information sorted by the web browser about a particular webpage or site. Browsers like Google Chrome, Edge and others store information such as stylesheets, images and JavaScript. Once the data is stored, a returning visitor to your web page does not need to reload the entire thing from the beginning.
There are many tools to help better utilize cache expiration dates, and one example is YSlow. The best way to optimize the page load speed is by extending the ‘expiry’ date. If you are not frequently updating your website, it is considered reasonable to extend the cache of the site up to one year. Google has more information about leveraging caching here.
7.Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A network of connected servers in various geographical areas can speed up the page load time. This is because, the geographically closest server can respond to the requesting user in the shortest possible time, which makes the load times much faster.
For example, if a device in Europe is accessing a server in Australia, pulling the data from a server closer to Europe would speed up the load times. Also spreading the content on multiple servers in various locations can reduce the number of requests to the server of origin. This reduces the unnecessary burden on the server.
8. Host the Website on a Fast Server
Seemingly obvious, and as the old saying goes ‘you get what you pay' for is very much true for web hosting. The cheaper the hosting server, it is likely to be slow in page load times. We recommend hosting your site on a turbo server for optimum results. Learn more about web hosting plans and prices on QuickSpout.
9. Declutter Your Back-end and Front-end
Website components, plugins, modules and JavaScript are notorious to slow down a site. So, be very careful when you pick these addons to your site and only install them if essential.
There are, however, plugins designed to enhance page speed. You will need to test things out and see if certain plugins serve their purpose for your site rather than hinder the primary objective.
Final thoughts
Humans and bots do not like slow web pages. Always follow Google’s recommendations on ranking algorithms to increase blog post speed. As you have seen from above, there is no hard and fast rule to make blog post faster. Instead, multiple contributing factors determine the user experience and search engine algorithms.
Slow hosting servers, large image files and extra plugins all contribute to slowing down the blog post. We are here to help you achieve fast-loading blog post speeds in case any of the above sounded too technical or complicated.