How to Optimize Your Website Speed for a 99 /100 Performance Score
on 8 June 2023, by Bogdan, in Blog, Cloud, Guides
by Bogdan
Optimizing your website’s speed will enable you to increase the time users spend on your site’s pages, convert more visitors into customers, and minimize the bounce rate on your website. There are multiple factors that affect a website’s speed.
Optimizing website speed refers to improving the performance of your website by employing different strategies and techniques to modify these factors.
In this article, we’ll look at some of those strategies and how to best implement them to maximize your website’s speed. But before we get to that, let’s examine why website speed is important and how to measure it.
Why is website speed important?
Website speed is important because it has both a direct and indirect influence over some key metrics that determine the success of a website. These include conversion rates, bounce rates, user experience, and SEO ranking.
A fast website:
- Provides a positive user experience
A fast-loading website enables users to have a smooth browsing experience and complete a desired action on your website hassle-free. Site speed is an important part of user experience as users expect your website to load in less than 3 seconds (Semrush). Anything beyond this makes them frustrated and ruins their experience with your site.
- Improves conversions while reducing the bounce rates
When users have a positive experience on a website, they will likely convert more. Site speed has a direct relationship with conversion and bounce rates. A recent study done by Portent revealed that the conversion rate of a website that loads in 1 second is three times higher than that which loads in 5 seconds. This also shows that the bounce rates increase as site speed reduces.
- Improves your SEO ranking
Site speed is one of the ranking factors for search engines. Search engines strive to deliver the best possible user experience, and they prioritize websites that load quickly. For this reason, faster websites are more likely to rank higher in search engine results, increasing visibility, organic traffic, and potential customers.
To sum up, a faster website will positively impact user retention, conversions, and search engine rankings.
How to test your website’s speed
Testing your website’s speed will allow you to determine how much you’ll need to do to optimize it. In addition, it will also help you to gauge if your optimization efforts are yielding the desired results. There are multiple online tools that you can use to generate reports on the speed of your website. Some of the most popular ones include:
- GTmetrix
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom
- Speed Lab
- and more.
They typically follow a similar procedure to test a website’s speed. All you have to do is provide your website’s URL and give it a few minutes to run the tests and generate a report. To show you how this works, let’s test amazon.com using GTmetrix.
Paste Amazon’s URL on GTmetrix and click on Analyze. GTmetrix will then generate a report containing an overall grade and the performance statistics of the website. Just below the grade and performance stats, you’ll see core web vitals metrics.
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics used to evaluate the user experience of web pages. These metrics focus on aspects of web performance that directly impact user satisfaction and engagement. The Core Web Vitals consist of three key metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - This indicates how long it takes for the main content of a webpage to be available to users. This shouldn't take longer than 3 seconds.
- First Input Delay (FID) - This reflects the responsiveness and interactivity of a web page. For instance, how long it takes for a button or link to respond after a user clicks on it. It should be less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - evaluates how much the page content moves or shifts, which can be disruptive to users. To provide a good user experience, the CLS should be less than 0.1.
Core Web Vitals are extremely important to you as the site owner since Google considers them when ranking websites. Websites with better scores for Core Web Vitals will likely have a higher SEO ranking.
Alternatively, these metrics will help you to know which areas you can improve to optimize your website’s speed. For instance, if the FID value is higher than 100 milliseconds, you have to improve the interactivity and responsiveness of elements such as buttons and links.
Suppose you've evaluated your website’s speed and found it to be slow, here's what you can do to optimize its speed.
How to optimize your website’s speed for a 99/100 score
There are various factors that influence the speed of your website. By applying the required strategies, you'll be able to modify these factors and optimize your website’s speed. Having said that, here are some strategies that you can implement to optimize your website's speed.
Move to a content management system
If you’re simply using a website builder for setting up your website, you should consider moving to a content management system(CMS) to optimize your site’s speed. This is because website builders are only equipped with design tools to create custom designs for your websites. However, they lack the infrastructure or tools which you can use to improve your site’s speed.
A CMS, on the other hand, is a complete solution that provides you with a variety of options to modify how your site operates and optimize its speed. There are tons o content management systems to choose from, but if you want to achieve a 99/100 score on performance, we highly recommend the Brizy Cloud CMS.
Brizy Cloud provides you with a versatile website builder and a potent CMS that enables you to build and manage your website in one place. The website builder is incredibly user-friendly and highly customizable to help you to build unique websites. And the CMS has a wide variety of built-in tools and integrations that you can use to optimize your website’s speed. We’ll cover them one after the other in the subsequent speed optimization strategies.
As a platform, Brizy Cloud is well-optimized to generate amazing page loading speeds. To illustrate this, here is a GTmetrix report on Agens, a website created and deployed on Brizy Cloud.
It has a 99/100 score for performance and scores highly for the Core Web Vitals. It has similar performance stats on Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights.
Minimize external solutions, plugins, or dependencies
When building websites, it is common practice to bring in external solutions or plugins for added functionality. For example:
- A contact form plugin when you want to use forms.
- A custom fonts plugin
- A popup builder, and so on.
However, external solutions or plugins add to the server load as each one requires server resources to work properly. This can impact the server's processing power and slow down the response time. Minimizing plugins helps reduce the strain on the server, leading to improved overall performance.
The best way to do this is by using a website builder that contains everything that you will need to build your website and more. For this, we recommend the Brizy builder because. It is a versatile solution that comes with all that you’ll need to set up a nice and complete website built into it. This includes:
- A complete website builder - a multi-purpose and user-friendly website builder with tons of elements and templates.
- A popup builder - it has a customizable popup builder which you can use to create custom popups for your website. You can create any type of popup including sales and promotions, alerts, or cookie popups, and choose when they are displayed using its display conditions feature.
- Contact forms integration - The Brizy website builder has a form element that you can use to create contact forms.
- Fully customizable templates - You can customize how the templates for Blog, custom assets, WooCommerce, dynamic stuff, etc. looks and works.
- Custom fonts - Brizy allows you to use custom fonts by default.
For conventional website builders, you’ll have to install a plugin for each of these functionalities. But with the Brizy builder, all of the above is built-in, so you won’t have to install more plugins that could slow down your website.
Consider switching to a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Loading all your website’s data from a single server location can be detrimental to your website’s speed. Users located far away from your server will experience slower load times on your website. This is because content has to travel a longer distance to get to them after they make a request.
A CDN can help to solve this problem by reducing the distance content has to travel to reach users. CDNs comprise a network of servers distributed across multiple locations. When a user requests content from a website, the CDN serves the content from the server that is closest to the user. This reduces the distance between the user and the server, minimizing latency and improving site speed.
- To help you to deliver content faster to users, the Brizy Cloud CMS has a built-in solid high-performance CDN with 35+ locations distributed globally. The CDN works automatically, no configurations are needed.
Optimize your images
Images make your website more visually appealing and engaging. However, high-resolution and large-size images can slow down your website since they take a longer time to load. Fortunately, there are a few different image optimization techniques that you can implement to improve your website’s speed.
- Compression - This involves removing unnecessary image data (for instance, less noticeable image details) without compromising its quality.
- Resizing - Reducing the size of the image file by scaling down images to match the required dimensions.
- Format optimization - Different image formats have varying file sizes and compatibility. Choosing the appropriate image format for each scenario can make a difference in site speed. For example, JPEG is suitable for complex images with many colors, while PNG is ideal for images with transparency or simple graphics.
To help you to optimize your images, Brizy’s website builder has built-in image optimization through its integration with Shortpixel. This integration allows you to compress your images, removing unnecessary data from them and improving your website’s speed in the process.
Prioritize a mobile-friendly website
Making your website fast on mobile devices should be a priority since a majority of traffic comes from mobile devices. Orbelo reports that this number is close to 61%. This is why you should spend your time and resources making your website mobile-first. The good news is that with Brizy’s website builder, you won’t have to.
It allows you to build mobile-optimized websites quickly and easily since each customization option, template, and layout on it is optimized for mobile. In addition, it is lightweight and doesn’t eat into system resources, allowing it to run smoothly in mobile devices.
Other optimization strategies
Apart from the main ones that we’ve discussed here, there are other numerous strategies that you can implement to optimize your website’s speed. These include:
- Minifying code files - You can reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript files by condensing the code. To do this you can remove any whitespace between the lines of code, deleting unused functions and variables, and so on. The downside here is that the code will be a lot less readable.
- Reduce the number of fonts you’re using - Multiple fonts help you to achieve visual hierarchy, for instance, distinguishing different headings. However, having too many fonts tends to slow your website down, and reducing them can improve your site’s speed.
- Caching - Caching involves storing frequently accessed data, such as web pages, images, CSS files, and JavaScript files, in a temporary storage location. When a user visits a website, their browser retrieves the cached data instead of making a new request to the server, resulting in faster page load times.
By implementing these techniques, you’ll be on your way to maximizing your website’s speed.
Conclusion
By optimizing your website’s speed, you’ll be able to encourage more visitors to convert or stay longer on your website. A faster website provides them with a smooth browsing experience.
There are a few different strategies you can implement to do this. They may seem like a lot of work but the Brizy Cloud platform simplifies everything for you. You can boost your website’s speed to score 99/100 in just a few clicks. So, optimize your website’s speed today, the results are totally worth it.
Start building better websites today!
Article by Bogdan
Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io
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