How to Optimize Page Speed to Meet Google’s Latest Update

How to Optimize Page Speed to Meet Google’s Latest Update “Most business models have focused on self interest instead of user experience,“ Tim Cook, CEO at Apple Fancy layouts, rich features and an informative content are important attributes to garner a great user experience provided your website has a fast loading speed. Yes, the loading speed of your website is the ultimate determining factor for the success (or otherwise) of your business. This has been confirmed by none other than Google in its recent update.

According to the update, a webpage’s loading speed will now be a ranking factor for mobile searches (Ref: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using­page­speed­in­ mobile­search.html.)

Google had hitherto confined the usage of page loading speed to desktop searches only.

However, the global trend of a growing mobile usage has prompted Google to alter its strategy. Does the latest announcement from Google ring an alarm bell? It is time your website’s loading speed was further increased to better your mobile search rankings.

Sounds difficult? Not quite! For we list a few steps to optimize your website in order to reduce its loading time. #1 Minification of HTML, CSS, and JS by using GruntJS: When coding is done by using HTML, CSS and JS, web developers typically use elements like ‘enter’, ‘tab’ and ‘spaces’ to enhance the readability of the codes. Moreover, they make annotations (in places) alongside the codes to explain the latter’s function or objective as well. However, these entries end up in increasing the size of the web page and reduce its loading speed. To counter this, a task runner named GruntJS can be used to achieve minification of the codes. The task runner can remove elements like ‘spaces’, ‘tabs’, ‘enter’ and annotations present in the codes to minimize the size of the web page. Furthermore, the task runner can compress the images as well to make them leaner. #2 Bundling multiple CSS and JS in a single file: Optimizing a website needs the writing of a vast number of codes especially in CSS and JS. These codes are typically saved in multiple CSS and JS files, which increase the number of HTTP requests. The task runner GruntJS can bundle multiple CSS and JS files in respective single files. This helps to reduce the number of HTTP requests thereby facilitating the quicker loading of codes (read web pages.) #3 Loading CSS and JS in the footer section: In the highly competitive digital landscape, customers want a quick access to information. This means the website should display the information (text based) first and not wait for the loading of the heavier fancy layouts/animations. This can be achieved by loading the CSS and JS in the footer section.

Consequently, when the user types the website’s URL on the browser, the text based content gets displayed quickly and the heavier layout/animation surrounding the text pops up a little later. This enhances the user experience a great deal. #4 Loading of JS: During the loading of an HTML webpage, if the browser encounters the external JS links it suspends HTML loading until the JS codes are fetched. This hinders the seamless loading of HTML and ultimately delays the loading of the content. To prevent this scenario, there are two processes ­ #4a Loading asynchronously: Here, an attribute called Async when added to JS, creates separate threads for both HTML and JS codes. These threads help the browser to fetch the codes asynchronously thereby hastening the loading of the webpage. #4b Lazy loading using Defer: Here, the attribute ‘Defer’ when added to JS, delays (read defer) the loading of JS till the process of HTML loading is completed. #5 Reducing the number of HTTP calling within 30: To reduce the loading time of a webpage, the number of HTTP calling (by the server) should be optimized to within 30.

This aspect has been validated by the website, grader.com as well.

#6 Lazy loading of images: The quick loading of a webpage is a pre­requisite to achieve a better UX. To ensure this, the images that are present above the fold area are loaded first.

For example, if a webpage contains around 100 images then, instead of loading the entire 100 images in a single swoop, only the ones that fit into the ‘above the fold content’ (the scroll area) say around 25, are loaded. The remaining images are loaded ‘lazily’ (read slowly) depending on the scrolling pattern of the user.

Conclusion The above mentioned tools and methodologies can help in optimizing your website and increase its loading speed. Since this is a highly technical and painstaking process, it is better to engage the services of an experienced web development company. The optimization exercise will help your business a great deal by improving its mobile search rankings and reaching out to your target customers.

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