A slow website can significantly impact your business. With user attention spans shrinking and search engines prioritizing fast-loading sites, optimizing your website for speed is critical. A long loading page means users leave your page without knowing what it looks like, increasing your bounce rate and inevitably leading to Google deranking your website.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a widely used tool that analyzes website performance and provides actionable recommendations to enhance page speed. However, interpreting these insights can be tricky, especially when faced with unfamiliar terms. This article delves into some of the most common Page speed issues and provides guidance on how to resolve them.

10 Page Speed Issues And How To Handle Them

Reduce Initial Server Response Time

When users first request your webpage, the server takes time to respond. A slow server response time can lead to prolonged page loading times,disturbing both user experience and SEO. This delay is often due to high traffic, poor hosting, or heavy database queries.

How to Fix:

• Upgrade Your Web Hosting: Opt for a high-performance hosting provider that suits your site’s needs. Shared hosting may be cheap but could lead to slower response times.
• Optimize Database Queries: Review your database for any inefficient queries and indexes. Clean up outdated or unnecessary data that might slow down the system.
• Implement Caching: Use server-side caching tools like Varnish or Redis to store and deliver previously requested data faster.

Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

Render-blocking resources, such as CSS or JavaScript files, can delay a webpage's loading. This is because they prevent the browser from rendering page content until the CSS and Javascript resources are fully loaded. This often leads to poor user experience as users are left waiting.

How to Fix:

• Defer JavaScript: Use the defer or async attribute in your <script> tags. This allows JavaScript to load asynchronously or be executed after the HTML parsing.
• Inline Critical CSS: Extract the essential CSS required to render the above-the-fold content and inline it directly within the HTML document. Load other CSS files asynchronously.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN can cache static resources like CSS and JavaScript closer to the user, reducing load times.

Optimize Images

Images are often the largest files on a webpage, which can drastically slow down loading times. Unoptimized images, especially large or improperly formatted ones, can hurt your PageSpeed score.

How to Fix:

• Compress Images: Use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to compress images without sacrificing quality. Additionally, you can automate this process via plugins for WordPress websites.
• Use Next-Gen Formats: Convert images to modern formats like WebP, which offer better compression than traditional formats like JPEG or PNG.
• Set Proper Dimensions: Always define the width and height attributes in the image HTML tags to prevent layout shifts during page load.

Leverage Browser Caching

When a user visits your site, their browser downloads several resources, including images, CSS, and JavaScript. Without browser caching, these resources must be downloaded again every time the user returns, slowing down page load times.

How to Fix:

• Check Your Cache Headers: Configure your server to include appropriate caching headers, like Cache-Control, to specify how long resources should be stored in the browser's cache.
• Use a Caching Plugin: For content management systems like WordPress, caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket make it easy to manage caching and boost page speed.
• Use a CDN: CDNs not only serve resources closer to users but also manage caching more efficiently.

Minimize HTTP Requests

Every time a webpage loads, the browser sends multiple HTTP requests to fetch various resources (images, CSS, JavaScript). The more requests a page makes, the longer it takes to load.

How to Fix:

• Combine CSS and JavaScript: Reduce the number of external files by combining CSS and JavaScript files where possible. For instance, instead of linking multiple CSS files, merge them into one.
• Use Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for images and videos so they only load when they are about to be viewed, reducing the initial number of HTTP requests.
• Reduce External Requests: Limit the use of external resources like fonts or third-party scripts that add unnecessary load time.

Avoid Excessive DOM Size

A large or complex Document Object Model (DOM) can slow down page rendering. When a browser has to process a massive number of nodes, it requires more time to build the DOM tree, especially on mobile devices.

How to Fix:

• Simplify HTML Structure: Keep your HTML code clean and avoid unnecessary nested elements. Use CSS classes and IDs wisely to prevent overly complex structures.
• Minimize JavaScript Manipulations: Excessive DOM manipulation via JavaScript can further slow down the page. Ensure you optimize your scripts and reduce unnecessary updates to the DOM.
• Paginate Large Lists: If your site contains long lists or tables, break them into smaller, paginated sections instead of loading everything at once.

Enable Text Compression

When a browser downloads text-based resources like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they can often be quite large, which increases load time.

How to Fix:

• Enable Gzip or Brotli Compression: These compression methods can significantly reduce the size of text-based resources, making them quicker to download. Most modern servers support Brotli, which is more efficient than Gzip.
• Minify Resources: Use tools like UglifyJS or CSSNano to minify your CSS and JavaScript files by removing unnecessary whitespace and comments.

Reduce Unused JavaScript

Many websites include unnecessary JavaScript that isn't needed for the initial page load, which wastes bandwidth and slows down the rendering process.

How to Fix:

• Audit JavaScript Usage: Use Chrome's Developer Tools to identify which JavaScript files are not critical to page rendering. Remove any unnecessary or unused code.
• Code Splitting: Implement code splitting techniques to load only the essential JavaScript when the page first loads, while deferring non-essential scripts.

Reduce Third-Party Code

Third-party scripts (e.g., tracking codes, ads, social media widgets) can significantly slow down your site if they are not properly optimized or deferred.

How to Fix:

• Limit the Number of Third-Party Scripts: Remove or minimize third-party plugins, scripts, and widgets that aren’t essential to the user experience.
• Asynchronous Loading: Ensure third-party code is loaded asynchronously to avoid blocking the main thread and impacting performance.
• ‍

Ensure Text Remains Visible During Webfont Load

When a website uses custom web fonts, there is a delay as these fonts are loaded. During this time, the text may be invisible or appear with fallback fonts, which can hurt user experience and PSI scores.

How to Fix:

• Use Font Display: Set font-display: swap; in your CSS to ensure that text remains visible using a fallback font while the web font is loading.
• Optimize Font Files: Reduce the number of font variations and weights used on your website. Only load the fonts and styles you need.

‍

Conclusion

Ensuring you PageSpeed score is high up in the 90’s is invaluable for your website’s functionality and will help largely with ranking. Following the steps in this article is sure to keep your page speed score up and your SERP ranking high.

‍