Website speed optimization can help you increase average time on page, reduce your bounce rate, and convert more visitors into customers. 

If you’re not sure how to get started, we’ve got you covered. Below we'll explain what website speed optimization is and 19 strategies that will help you improve your website speed and overall website performance. 

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What is website speed optimization?

Website speed optimization is the set of strategies and best practices implemented to make a website as fast as possible.

Website speed optimization offers other benefits as well, like a higher conversion rate, lower bounce rate, and improved user experience.

Several studies prove that website speed interrelates with other key metrics. For example, according to a recent study by Portent, a B2B site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate that's three times higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.

Each additional second of load time steepens that difference in conversion rate, as seen in the chart below. 

When looking at overall goal conversion rates instead of ecommerce conversions, the dropoff of conversions is much steeper as sites get slower, according to Portent. When pages load in 1 second, the average conversion rate is 39%. At a 2-second load time, the conversion rate drops to 34%. At 5 seconds, the conversion rate drops to 22%. After that, you can expect roughly half the conversion rate of lightning-fast websites.

How to Optimize Your Website Speed

Your hosting provider, images, JavaScript and CSS files, and web fonts are just a few factors that can impact your website speed. To get the fastest website possible, you can optimize all these factors by following the steps below. While not exhaustive, this list will form a comprehensive optimization strategy. 

1. Audit Your Site

Before making any changes that impact how your site loads and handles content, it’s worth auditing its current performance.

To start, you can use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights. It will assess your Core Web Vitals on mobile (by default) or desktop and let you know if you passed. It will also provide a color-coded score reflecting your site’s overall performance, and identify opportunities for improving your score. Here's an example for Forbes.com. 

Your assessment should also include actual experience: access your website from multiple devices and see what the experience feels like. Is it seamless and speedy, or cumbersome and clunky?

The more data you have about how your site performs, the better your ability to identify and implement key fixes.

2. Prioritize Potential Fixes

Once you’ve identified website speed issues, it's tempting to try to fix everything at once. But even if you had unlimited resources and time, we wouldn't recommend this approach. 

Instead, try to prioritize potential fixes based on what matters most to your visitors. For example, if your site takes a significant amount of time to start loading, focus your efforts on server-side concerns such as hosting provider problems or DNS issues. This takes priority even if the content on your site also struggles to deliver at speed — because visitors won't stick around to see your content if the page itself takes long to load.

You can also use the recommendations and diagnostics provided by speed testing tools, like PageSpeed Insights, to help prioritize your optimization efforts. For example, when looking at the list below, you would prioritize reducing main-thread work — the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS — over avoiding large layout shifts. 

It can give users faster-loading websites that respond more efficiently to user interactions, which helps your business boost user satisfaction and search engine rankings.

3. Evaluate Your Current Hosting Provider

As noted above, your hosting provider could be a potential source of speed problems. While several factors could contribute to speed issues, including the geographical location of your provider, their physical infrastructure and the overall bandwidth of their network connection, the type of web hosting your website is using can also impact performance.

Three common types are shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting.

• Shared: Although shared hosting options are the most cost-effective, they split hosting resources among multiple sites, which lowers overall performance. This will especially cause problems if your site gets spikes in traffic or a consistent amount of high traffic.
• VPS: Virtual private server (VPS) options logically segment services on a shared physical drive to improve performance but still face speed issues if resource loads are high.
• Dedicated: Dedicated servers are more expensive than shared or VPS options but will significantly boost your speed, regardless of resource load. 

4. Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

When all data required to fully load your site is stored in one place, initial and ongoing load times suffer.

This issue will only heighten as internet and data service providers continue to experience dramatic growth in internet traffic worldwide. According to the World Development Report 2021 by The World Bank, global internet traffic is expected to reach 150,000 GB per second by the end of 2022, which is a 1000% increase from 2002.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) can help. They use multiple servers to store replications of your content across multiple locations. When users visit your site, the CDN chooses the server (or servers) closest to their physical location to optimize content delivery.

Image Source

CDNs are becoming increasingly popular. In fact, according to data from the Cisco Visual Networking Index, CDNs will carry 72% of Internet traffic by 2022.

5. Optimize Your Images

Images can make your site more engaging and memorable, but they can also drag down loading times, especially if they’re high resolution.

According to the HTTP Archive, the median weight of images on a web page on desktop is over 1,000 KB (!).

Compressing these images before adding them to your site can save precious weight and time — many photo-editing programs now include “save for web” options that optimize images for websites but there are also free, online options available for compressing common files types such as .JPG, .PNG and .TIFF. TinyPG is just one example.

Instead of using one of the image formats above and running them through an image compression tool, you could use the WebP format. This format provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images.  According to data from Google, WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. 

6. Reduce Total Redirects

Redirects send users away from the page they’ve clicked on to another page — in many cases, they’re a great way to connect high-ranking, high-traffic pages to newer content you’ve created. The problem? More redirects mean more load on the server, which can increase loading time.

While it’s worth using a redirect initially to keep content views steady, replace old redirects with new content ASAP to keep load times short.

7. Limit HTTP Requests

Every HTTP request — for images, stylesheets, scripts, and fonts — adds to your site’s overall load time. As your site grows, these HTTP requests start to stack up and eventually create a noticeable delay between user click-throughs and actual page loading.

The good news is that many of the strategies in this guide, like using a CDN and minifying CSS and JS files, can help limit the number of HTTP requests you site makes.  

8. Compress, Compress, Compress

The more you can reduce file sizes without compromising quality, the better your website performance. One of the most robust and reliable compression frameworks is Gzip, but other methods can also deliver reduced file sizes without impacting the user experience.

According to data from W3Techs, over 88% of all websites use compression and almost 60% use Gzip specifically. 

Ask your web hosting service what type of compression they’re using. If they’re not using any, consider a new provider or check out this guide for enabling Gzip compression.