What is Page Speed?

Page speed is the time it takes to load a website – Website Speed.

The loading time or speed of a page is determined by various factors, including the server hosting the page, the size of the page file, and image compression.

"Page speed" is not as easy as it sounds.

This is because there are many different ways to measure page speed.

Here are the three most well-known:

Fully loaded page: This is how long it takes for 100% of the resources on a page to load. This is the simplest way to determine how quickly a page loads.

Time until the first byte: This measures how long it takes for a page to start loading.

If you've ever landed on a page and stared at a white screen for a few seconds, TTFB is at work.

First meaningful color / first context-related color: This is the time the load needs to load enough of the content resources onto your page.

Let's say you have a blog post that takes 10 seconds to load completely.

That's a long time... if you ONLY look at how long it takes for the entire page to load.

However, paying attention to First Meaningful Paint sometimes provides a better representation of how users actually interact with your page while it is loading.

For example, let's consider again the page that takes 10 seconds to load all of the page's resources.

Even though loading the entire page takes a while, the user receives a "first meaningful color" after 1,5 seconds when they first land on the page.

This means you can interact with your page immediately.

So, for a user, your page loads quickly…

The end result?

There are many ways to measure page speed.

And there is no "right" metric that surpasses all others.

They all have advantages and disadvantages.

Instead, focus on improving page load speed for ALL metrics you can find.

Why is page speed important for SEO?

Since 2010 Google uses page speed as an SEO ranking factor.

And in 2019, Google released the loading time update, or rather... Speed ​​Update The importance of page speed has increased.

A slow website speed can severely damage Google ranking.

The question is: WHow does Google determine your website's loading speed? Do they look at how long it takes for 100% of the page to load? Or TTFB (Time To First By)?

They have not made any official statements on the matter.

However, given that they report on all these metrics in their PageSpeed ​​Insights tool, we are told that they are likely using a combination of different page speed measurements:

Here's how you can improve the loading speed of your website.

Page Speed ​​Tips & Tricks

Compress images

We prioritize this because it's usually the biggest win.

Images typically take up 50-90% of the page size.

The more you can compress your images, the faster your page will load.

We compress 100% of the images here at MIC Group with tools such as compressjpeg.com or compresspng.com.

And they still look good.

Enable browser caching

This allows users to save parts of your page in their browser cache.

So the next time you visit your website, users will be able to load it MUCH faster.

Unfortunately, your page will not load faster for first-time visitors.

However, it is ideal for improving loading speed for people who have previously visited your website.

You can configure browser caching in your .htaccess file.

Or with one Wordpress-Plugin.

Implement a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one of the simplest methods to increase the loading speed of your website.

CDNs work by finding out where your visitor is physically located… and then delivering your site's resources from a nearby server.

Clean and compress your code

Mit anderen Worten: Minimize the resources on your site.

This includes:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• And any other code on your page

The first step should be to clean up bloated code on your site.

This additional code could come from features that you no longer have on your website or from poor developer work.

Either way: The cleaner your code is, the faster things will load.

Then compress your code using a program like GZip.

Update the hosting

You can clean up the code and compress the image all day.

However, if you spend CHF 4,99 per month on hosting, your website will not load quickly.

This is because you are sharing a server with a million other websites.

There are one million web hosts.

Therefore, we cannot particularly recommend any one.

But we can say this in general: When it comes to hosting, you get what you pay for.

If you really want to improve your website's loading speed, it may be time to upgrade to a premium host or a dedicated server.

Test with multi-page page speed tools

We recommend that you perform page speed tests using two different tools.

The first one is Google Insights PageSpeed.

The Google tool scans your page's code for page speed problems and potential improvements.

A feature was recently added that indicates how long it takes for your website to load for actual users (using Google Chrome browser data).

Which is SUPER useful.

A word of warning: Sometimes you will find that the tool's recommendations are not useful for your website.