Since Google's Mobilegeddon, page load speed has become a hot topic in website development, not only due to competition from mobile visitors but also due to possible lead and client losses.

While page speed affects search rankings and Facebook promotes Instant Articles, it's clear that websites must speed up, but how fast is fast enough?

What is the maximum page loading time that customers will tolerate, and what will cause them to close the tab and look for something else?

The time it takes for a page to load is a major ranking factor.

For your visitors, your website must load quickly. While it may not be your desired answer, your website visitors will appreciate it. You may continue to improve your website and better serve your visitors by tracking your bounce rate (in Google Analytics or similar metric trackers) and page load time (using the Chrome extension "Page Load Time" or more sophisticated trackers).

Why Is Page Loading Time Crucial for SEO?

While you may be aware of the obvious solution, it does not present you with a target to strive for. Before I get into the levels you should (and shouldn't) aim for, you should know that page speed metrics are nonsense. The same statistics are frequently provided and are dated, although technology is far from dated and is constantly improving.

What Should Your Page Speed Be?

To summarize, your website page speed should be as fast as possible without affecting the consumer experience. While Google strives for the speed of a blink, your website may strive for the speed of a breath.

Several aspects influence page performance, including the browser, device, web hosting provider, and content on the page, which is why you should focus on the demands of your visitors.

What is a Good Page Load Speed?

An ideal page load time is between 0-2 seconds, but 3 seconds is also considered to be an acceptable score. Anything above 3 seconds increases the likelihood of visitors leaving your site.

How can I reduce the loading time of a website? 

Do you want to learn how to improve the performance of your website but don't know where to begin? We've got you covered, so don't worry. Here are 12 website speed improvement levers to raise your SEO rankings, improve website performance, and improve user experience.

1. Use a fast host or set up a fast infrastructure.

Having the correct infrastructure is the first step in improving page performance. Make sure your web stack is optimized for speed. Invest in a dedicated, high-performance server for your website. Shared servers might slow down your website even if it has a clean design and well-optimized code. Make sure you're using the most up-to-date technology. Also, make sure that caching is optimized.

2. Use a content delivery network.

Do you want to know how to make a web page load faster? Reduce the data that must travel between your server and the end user. Isn't that correct? Using a CDN is a simple way to accomplish this. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of globally spread servers (also known as POPs). They work together to speed up the delivery of your site content. A CDN is a wonderful solution to boost website speed, whether your site includes HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, or videos.

3. Compress files with Gzip.

GZip is a type of server-side data compression that can help you save time when loading pages. In other words, it reduces the size of a set of data so that it may be delivered more quickly and efficiently to a user's computer. Gzip compression compresses HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files to make them smaller. It is important to note that it does not work with images or videos because they are already compressed independently.

The good news is that if you utilize a CDN, your website is almost definitely already secured because the majority of CDNs employ GZip compression by default.

4. Cut down on the amount of HTTP requests.

One of the most efficient methods for speeding up page load time is to limit the number of HTTP queries a website makes. When someone accesses a website, their browser pings the web server to request the content files that make up the page. After the server returns the requested files, the browser displays the content on the page. Each file that makes up the content of the page is sent by the browser as a separate HTTP request. Your web page will take longer to load as there are more HTTP requests made when there are more files on a page.

5. Reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript.

Minifying JavaScript and CSS files is another efficient way to reduce website load time. Minification is a procedure that streamlines code by removing any extraneous characters, comments, and spaces and replacing them with shorter variable and function names. The fewer bytes of data in your code, the faster and easier your page will load.

6. Make your HTML more streamlined.

Streamline your HTML code to speed up your website. The amount of data delivered to consumers is increased when HTML is bloated. When modifying the DOM, it can also have an impact on JavaScript performance. If your HTML pages have 5,000 or 6,000 lines of code before any content appears on the page (yes, this happens, even among Fortune 500 companies), you're dealing with bloated HTML.

7. Reduce the time it takes for a page to load by optimizing pictures.

One of the most likely reasons for website slowness is...

Images! Images that are huge. Some websites have photographs that are over 1MB in size, while others are over 5 MB. Yikes! That is not something you should do. Large image files significantly slow down the pace of your landing page and make visitors wait (often in frustration).

Optimize your photographs without sacrificing image quality. You want modest image files but don't want your website to look amateurish. You can utilize a variety of image optimization plugins for WordPress.

8. Go through your media library and clean it up.

Over time, your media collection has likely become cluttered with old or unused images. Your website will become clogged as a result of this. Clean up your media library for faster average page load times by eliminating extra photos and other media assets.

9. Organize your info.

Like your media library, your database might become bloated over time with unneeded information such as images, files, and other documents.

The practice of finding and removing trash data and unneeded material from your database is known as database optimization. As a result, your web hosting server will be able to get the required information more quickly.

10. Remove any JavaScript that is rendering-blocking.

When a browser loads your web pages, a call is sent to each script, which may be located at different URLs. Before the user may see the page, that queue of scripts must be completed and empty. Render-blocking JavaScript files constitute a major stumbling block in these queues since they might take a long time to load, preventing the main content on the page from being rendered.

Web browsers load resources in the order they appear in the HTML by default. When the resources on the user's device need a lot of processing resources, they can create a significant delay in the visual rendering of the website. However, many of these scripts aren't required to see the web page in the first place. In many circumstances, running these scripts after the page has loaded is acceptable.

Set your render-blocking JavaScript to load asynchronously or eliminate unused or unnecessary scripts to address this problem (or unused portions of your JavaScript resources).

11. Using Expires Headers is a good idea.

Expires Returning visitors to your website benefit from headers because they aid in reducing page load time. They tell the browser whether to request a file from the server or fetch it from its cache. To speed up page load time, this minimizes the number of downloads from the server as well as the number of HTTP queries.

There are sometimes dozens of files per page on modern websites. Each file, especially huge files, contributes to the load time. However, transferring each file necessitates a request to the server, which adds more time to the operation. Expiration headers tell the browser how long a file should be kept in the cache so that subsequent users from the same machine don't have to retrieve it again.

12. Don't use URL redirects

A URL redirect is a command or procedure that automatically moves a user from one URL to another. A redirect can be implemented in a variety of ways. A 301 redirect is a technique for preserving the forwarding page's SEO value. However, regardless of the sort of redirect, this procedure slows down the speed of your page because switching from one file to another takes time. As a result, if possible, aim to avoid or reduce the number of URL redirects.