If your web­site is bog­ging down your users and their devices with heavy pages and poor user expe­ri­ences, then it’s time to put your web­site on a diet. The lighter your site is, the more your users will like you (and stick around). All these tips will help you bet­ter meet Google’s page speed guide­lines and be a lean, mean, mon­ey-mak­ing machine.

A long time ago, back in the days of HTML tables and 256 col­ors, the web was pret­ty slow. All those users on dialup could­n’t down­load large sites and heavy images. The stan­dard page weight at that time was 100kb. Your entire page should weigh no more than 100kb. Real­ly, true sto­ry. But the Inter­net has got­ten fat as it approach­es mid­dle age. It has let itself go. Web­sites are get­ting heav­ier and heav­ier. Faster con­nec­tions have made us lazy. I do many site audits and fre­quent­ly see sites that have page weights not over 1MB, which would be quite heavy, but over 10MB and even over 20 MB. How did we get to pages that down­load over 10 MB or 20 MB of data on every first ren­der? A myth exists that band­width is unlim­it­ed (it isn’t) and free (not the case for mobile or inter­na­tion­al). But even when band­width is free and unlim­it­ed, it isn’t always fast. Not only will your users thank you for putting your web­site on a diet, but also Google will reward you for it. In fact, Google con­sid­ers page speed so impor­tant they even wrote a patent for it. So what should a site do? Here are five tips on how to make your web­site faster.

1. Remove Excess Ads

One of the biggest issues fac­ing sites today is the over­abun­dance of ad slots on the page. Not only is exces­sive ad use an issue for Google and Google News, but your users hate it too. Ads are a prob­lem because they come with script­ing and pix­els and third-par­ty calls. We can see page weights go up by more than 100 per­cent when a site is over­loaded with adver­tis­ing. A good ad cam­paign isn’t about sim­ply stick­ing more ads on the page. It’s about cre­at­ing rel­e­vant, seam­less, fric­tion­less page expe­ri­ences where users are like­ly to click on your ad (not be put off by them). Remov­ing exces­sive adver­tis­ing from your site often posi­tions you bet­ter in Google and reduces your bounce rates. Although you may make a lit­tle less mon­ey in the short term, you’ll make more in the long run. Bonus Tip Use Web­Pagetest to get a quick idea of how your site is load­ing. Review the “Water­fall” doc­u­ment, which will show you where in the page load process your ads are load­ing and how many calls they are cre­at­ing. Then add Google Tag Man­ag­er to your site. It will load all approved scripts asyn­chro­nous­ly, which means they won’t load until after the page first ren­ders. It also has the added ben­e­fit of let­ting your team edit pix­els and tag­ging with­out hav­ing to both­er the IT team.

2. Enable Caching & Compression

One of the largest issues we see on web­sites is the lack of prop­er caching and com­pres­sion. Just adding GZIP and set­ting your cache dates to a more dis­tant point in the future can dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce your page load, espe­cial­ly on the sec­ond vis­it. Bonus Tip You can use Google Page Speed Insights to get an idea of how well your site is caching and com­press­ing your pages. If your site receives a score under an 80 in desk­top of mobile it is too slow. You want to get it above that score. You also can check your page load times in Google Ana­lyt­ics under page tim­ings. This will let you see how users are find­ing your pages

3. Optimize Your Images

Images are often over­looked and usu­al­ly the biggest offend­ers. Peo­ple from all parts of your com­pa­ny are upload­ing images and typ­i­cal­ly they aren’t trained about the prop­er way to cre­ate them. Image resiz­ing isn’t an answer. Resiz­ing does­n’t com­press the image, it just changes its phys­i­cal size. So what do you do? Make sure that who­ev­er is in charge of uploads knows how to prop­er­ly cre­ate, com­press, and save images. This means you need to:

• Resize: Phys­i­cal­ly resize the images to the cor­rect size, or at least the largest cor­rect size.
• For­mat: Images need to be saved in the prop­er for­mat – pho­tos as JPGs and line art as PNGs.
• Com­pres­sion: Images need to be com­pressed on save. If the image is a JPG, then 60 per­cent is a good com­pres­sion rate.
• SVG: Use SVG when you can. SVG (Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics) are code-based images, which are light­weight and down­load quick­ly. How­ev­er, make sure you aren’t replac­ing a small image with SVG, which could be more resource inten­sive.

Bonus Tip Use a CDN to host your images. A CDN or Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work helps place your images clos­er to the user that is request­ing them with the page down­load.

4. Check Your Hosting

Often a site has issues deliv­er­ing con­tent quick­ly because of servers that share a lot of sites, aren’t up to speed, or are oper­at­ing in poor envi­ron­ments. Have your IT team check your servers for how fast it can retrieve the DNS and what your Time To First Byte is (that is your first pix­el down­loaded) This need to be under .80 ms. Know­ing these met­rics can help you quick­ly dis­cov­er unknown serv­er issues. Bonus Tip Use vir­tu­al­ly ded­i­cat­ed or ded­i­cat­ed host­ing. This gives your site its own “room” to hang out in and allows you to serve your pages more quick­ly.

5. Speed Up Your Scripting

Sites today are over­loaded with script­ing. Script­ing that adds func­tion­al­i­ty, script­ing that tracks users, script­ing that loads pages, script­ing, script­ing, script­ing. The issue with script­ing is the more you add the slow­er your pages become. Every script adds resources calls. Every script cre­ates more obsta­cles to fast page load­ing. What can you do? When you’re adding scripts to your pages the fol­low­ing con­sid­er­a­tions should be in place:

• Do you need this script? Seems basic, but there are many times that scripts are added to add some­thing “cool” to a site. Only in rare cas­es, how­ev­er, do users actu­al­ly care about cool. What they actu­al­ly care about fast. So before you add that cool script ask your­self: does it make the user’s expe­ri­ence bet­ter and, if so, does it add to the expe­ri­ence with­out slow­ing it down?
• Can we com­bine this script? Scripts are often added as they are added into the stack, each hav­ing its own ini­tial­iz­er. Com­bine your scripts into one file if you can. This way you can load them at one time and min­i­mize resource calls.
• Are we using only the libraries we need? Libraries are used by scripts to make the pro­gram­ming process eas­i­er. How­ev­er, they also load in a lot of unnec­es­sary code. Make sure when you added a script to the page that you are only load­ing what you need and not the kitchen sink that comes along with it.

Bonus Tip Use Google’s Guide­lines for opti­miz­ing JavaScript. This will help your devel­op­ers lean up that code.

A Quick Word About Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages is Google’s lat­est method of speed­ing up your mobile site. AMP pages have a lot of lim­i­ta­tions but if you have a pub­lish­er site with lim­it­ed script­ing needs it might be the way to go. Note: This involves a lot of devel­op­ment work, so make sure to check with your IT team to see if it is even pos­si­ble for what you do. If AMP isn’t a solu­tion for you, then try using these guide­lines to make your site as fast as pos­si­ble. Speed plays heavy into mobile search rank­ings and also affects desk­top. NOTE: The ser­vice was turned off, but the Guide­lines still offer a lot of insight into what Google sees as impor­tant when you’re try­ing to speed up your web­site.