1 – Compress the images you use
This is the main reason that penalizes the speed of pages on the Internet.
And yet, it is the easiest to correct!
What usually happens when you add an image to your site?
1 – You look for or create the ideal image to illustrate your point;
2 – You upload it on your site and integrate it to your page;
The end.
In fact, you only need to add one step to your process: compressing the image. And it’s not complicated at all!
When we talk about image compression, it means that we will try to reduce its weight as much as possible, while keeping an optimal quality for the display on the web.
We will not go into technical details that do not interest us here. But you should know that on the web, the difference in quality between a compressed and uncompressed image will often be imperceptible to the naked eye.
I have already seen web pages that integrated photos or GIFs of more than 10Mb! That’s shooting yourself in the foot in terms of SEO!
Fortunately, there are tons of solutions to compress an image easily, it’s up to you to find the one that suits you best:
Graphic design tools
If you work with graphic designers, illustrators or photographers, chances are they use a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator.
Well, you should know that these tools have options that allow you to save images in predefined formats for the web. Don’t hesitate to tell them your needs, they will provide you with an optimized visual!
If you are the one using these tools, have a look at the export options or consult the online tutorials!
Online tools
Here again, many solutions exist: TinyPNG, Compressor, Optimizilla, Imagify…
No matter which tool you choose, the operation is the same: import your images and launch the compression. In a few seconds you will obtain an image between 60 and 90% lighter!
You will then be able to serenely integrate this visual into your web pages!
Plugins for your CMS
You use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Shopify or Prestashop?
Add a compression plugin that will do the job automatically! When you upload an image in the media library, it will first be compressed by the plugin before being added.
As the WordPress plugin catalog is more extensive, you will find many more plugins dedicated to the platform like WP Smush for example.
But solutions like TinyPNG, available online, also offer plugins for the main CMS on the market.
Don’t forget to resize your images!
Compressing is good, but compressing a resized image is even better!
And yes, we tend to easily forget this logical step!
Let’s take the example of this blog page. At the moment I’m writing this article, the display width of the content is 650px. If I integrate a 1200px wide image, it would still be displayed at 650px.
This means that if I resize this image from 1200px to 650px wide, I would already have a much smaller file before I even run the compression!
2 – Streamline the design and the UX
When you create your website or when you want to redesign it, you may be tempted to focus on aesthetics rather than user experience (UX).
I’m sure you’ve already visited a website that uses a lot of visual effects (animations, superimposed content blocks…). You may have found it beautiful, but the slowness of the site and the navigation difficulties spoiled your visit.
This is what you must avoid on your pages. Try to keep only the essential or useful elements for the visitor. The rest is superfluous.
If you still fall for the superb hover animation you saw on a site that caught your eye, be careful not to overdo it.
The risk is even greater with turnkey themes proposed by designers for your CMS sites like WordPress. These themes are certainly very beautiful, but often poorly optimized in terms of loading performance.
Be sure to ask before you buy. Do you really need all the widgets and features offered? Will you need to add extensions to meet your other needs? Are the user reviews good? Also, don’t hesitate to test the performance of sites using this theme with the tools seen above!
Anyway, the best practice to follow is to stay sober on adding elements to your web page. Each of them will be as much weight in the code and potential additional requests when loading the page.
3 – Compress, minify and cache the code
This is a much more technical action, but don’t panic!
If your site has been developed by an agency or internally, you will have to check with the people concerned that all these actions have been implemented.
If you use a CMS, there are plugins that will take care of this part for you!
But let’s see how it works:
All the files and lines of code used to display and run your website have a weight that will play on the loading time of your pages.
The challenge is to compress these HTML and CSS files. We will try to make sure that the user has to download as little data as possible during his visit.
Another highly recommended optimization is the minification of the code. This means that we will try to eliminate unnecessary characters for the proper execution of the code of a page.
With minification, it is also possible to pack different files in order to create as few requests as possible for each page load.
Finally the last step of this part will be to cache the resources of your website. Concretely, this means that we will ask the visitor’s browser to temporarily store a certain number of elements on his device.
Thus, the next time the page is consulted, it will load faster because some elements will not be downloaded again!
4 – Sorting through extensions and plugins
If you are using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Shopify or Prestashop, then it is likely that over time, you will end up with a LOT of extensions and plugins.
You should know that some extensions will add requests (elements to load) on the pages on which they are active. They contribute to make your pages take longer to load. And sometimes they are even present on all the pages of your site!
This can be the case if for example you use a plugin for the management of the consent related to the cookies of your site. Or if you use a chatbot. Or if you use marketing automation solutions to display forms and retrieve visitor data.
Of course, some extensions are essential in your marketing strategy and you can’t do without them.
On the other hand, there are surely some that you no longer use or that you have replaced with alternatives. Think about deactivating or removing them.
5 – Choosing the right hosting
This last point is not directly related to your site itself.
Your site is necessarily hosted on a server somewhere in the world. This has several consequences on the loading speed of your site.
Indeed, each provider offers different hosting options. If your site is on a shared hosting, then it will be from a technical point of view less performing than a site running on a dedicated server.
You will also hear about CDN, SSR and other such acronyms. But their usefulness or not depends on your site and your activity. It’s up to you to compare the different offers and to see the solutions that the providers propose to you!
You should also know that if you only work with prospects and customers based in France, then it is better to have a hosting in France rather than abroad. The geographical proximity impacts to some extent the speed of loading of your pages depending on the location from which they are consulted.