Over the past few years, Google has increased the influence of page load time on how high your website ranks. Try some of these tips to make your website fast and take advantage of new browser features.
A fast website not only provides a better experience, but can also increase conversions and improve your search engine rankings. Google has introduced three Core Web Vitals metrics to measure user experience and uses them as a ranking factor.
In this article by digital agency “Grow Easy”, you will learn what you can do to test and optimize your website's performance.
Get started in Google Search Console
Want to know if optimizing Core Web Vitals is something you should consider? Use the Page Performance report in Google Search Console to check if any of your website's pages are loading too slowly.
Search Console displays data that Google collects from real users in Chrome, and this is the data that is used as a ranking signal. You can see exactly which page URLs need to be optimized.
Perform a website speed test
Google's real user data will tell you how fast your website is, but it won't provide analytics that explain why your site is slow.
Take a free website speed test to find out. Simply enter the URL of the page you want to test. You'll get a detailed report on your website's performance, including recommendations on how to optimize it.
Use prioritization tips to optimize Contentful's Biggest Picture
Priority prompts are a new browser feature coming in 2022. It allows website owners to indicate how important an image or other resource is on a page.
This is especially important when optimizing for Largest Contentful Paint, one of the three Core Web Vitals metrics. It measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to appear after it is opened.
By default, browsers assume that all images are low priority until the page starts rendering and the browser knows which images are visible to the user. This way, no bandwidth is lost to low priority images at the bottom of the page or in the footer. But it also slows down the important images at the top of the page.
Adding a fetchpriority="high" attribute to the img element responsible for the Largest Contentful image ensures that it will be fetched quickly.
Use lazy image loading for optimization
Lazy loading of images means that images are loaded only when they become visible to the user. This is a great way to help the browser focus on the most important content first.
However, lazy loading images can also cause images to load slowly, especially when a JavaScript lazy loading library is used. In this case, the browser must first load the JavaScript library before it can begin loading the images. This long chain of requests means that the browser needs some time to load the image.
Today, browsers support built-in lazy loading with the loading="lazy" attribute for images. This way you can take advantage of the benefits of lazy loading without having to download a JavaScript library first.
Remove and optimize resources blocking the preview
Preview-blocking resources are network requests that the browser must make before it can display any content on the user's page. These include the HTML document, CSS stylesheets, and some JavaScript files.
Because these resources have such a large impact on page load time, you should check each of them to see if it's really necessary. The async keyword in the HTML script tag allows you to load JavaScript code without blocking rendering.
If a resource should block preview, see if you can optimize the request to load the resource faster, for example by improving compression or loading the file from your main web server instead of a third party.
Optimize with the new Interaction to Next Paint metric
Google has announced a new metric called Interaction to Next Paint. This metric measures how quickly your site responds to user input and will likely become one of the key web metrics in the future.
You can now see how your site is doing on this metric using tools like PageSpeed Insights.
Continuously monitor your site's performance
One-off site speed tests can identify performance issues on your website, but they don't make it easy to track test results and confirm that your optimizations are working.
DebugBear continuously monitors your site to check, and alerts you when there's a problem. The tool also makes it easy to show clients the impact of your work and share test results with your team.
Learn more from the world of technology and SEO site optimization on our blog here.