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If there is one criterion that remains influential in natural referencing, it is the loading speed of a site. If it is too long, your visitors will leave as soon as they arrive and Google will penalize your position in the search results.

So that this does not happen you must pay attention to certain parameters of your site, both at the level of your host and within your pages.

Let's take a look at the factors to take into account to improve the loading time of your site.

seo

Why improve the loading time of your site?

The web page loading time is essential to the success of a professional site! Just like content, it should not be overlooked because even if you have the best information or services online, you won't get visitors with a slow site. Indeed, Internet users do not have the patience to wait for the opening of such a page, and they will choose to do other searches as soon as possible.

You must therefore give them quick access if you do not want to scare them away. It should be noted that most Internet users use a mobile network connection which is quite unstable, and you can already be sure that they will not linger waiting for the loading. Optimizing loading time will therefore have a major impact on your site with the number of visitors, page views, etc., but it will also be advantageous for natural referencing.

What is the link between site loading time and SEO on Google?

It is important to know that Google uses computer robots to reference the pages of each website! The faster the page loads, the faster the bots will be able to access it. In this way, the fast site will crowd out the slow sites, because it will be indexed much faster by the robots. It will therefore be more efficient and will appear easily in search engines if the referencing has been effective.

It should also be noted that the more a page is consulted, the higher its ranking will go up in the search results. However, you should know that 40% of Internet users will not wait more than 3 seconds for a page to open and they will turn to other sites as mentioned above, and with one more second, the conversion rate will be even higher. reduced to 7%. If you have no visitors, it will therefore mean that your ranking will drop to the bottom of the scales, and this is still one of the advantages of choosing a site that opens quickly.

From a marketing point of view, the losses caused by the slowness of your site can be heavy, while a fast site will allow you to increase the number of traffic and these few percentages to recover will have an excellent impact on the turnover. 'business.

Before applying the tips that we are going to share with you below, however, you must be able to know precisely the current situation of the loading speed of your site! You can trust your analysis by entering the latter, and putting yourself in the place of the visitor. If you feel the need for improvement is that it will have to be done.

However, there are other ways to do this analysis. These are the diagnostic tools that will give you recommendations on the elements of the site to improve.

You can choose WordPress to analyze SEO quality and the tool will advise you on any gaps in the text (on the number of keywords, repetitions, etc.). Its corrective systems save both loading time and site performance, and you can bring your own customization.

You can also use SEMrush if you want to check the traffic count on your site, before jumping into the fixes. The tool will do the analysis in relation to the quantity of backlinks or through the provenance of the consulting IPs.

Google PageSpeed Insights

It is a tool developed by Google, which consists in analyzing the performance of the site in general! These will include the loading rate, the conversion rate as well as the bounce rate. The diagnosis of the tool is detailed and therefore you will get precise results on the shortcomings to be corrected. But that's not all ! The tool will also help you with advice on each point to improve in order to achieve the best result in terms of site performance.

Web.dev

Web.dev is also a tool from Google that aims to help developers. It therefore allows you to make a complete summary of the performance criteria essential to the proper functioning of your site. These include SEO quality, loading speed, site accessibility, user experience, and more.

Octopulse

Octopulse is a powerful tool that boosts your SEO to the maximum. Starting with the SEO audit to the competitive analysis, the tool will take care of checking the weight of your pages, the lexicality, the placement, etc. The tool will then guide you on the steps to follow to increase the number of traffic visiting your site and it will give you all the optimization advice for positioning.

10 tips to boost the loading time of your website

1. Choose the right web host

When the time comes to choose your host , the choice is not easy. There are a large number of them and at all prices.

You might be tempted by a host at an affordable price, or even not expensive at all, but be careful. These savings are likely to be made to the detriment of the quality of the service offered.

Some host many sites on the same server, the latter not being optimized for:

1. Receive traffic from dozens or even hundreds of sites at the same time
2. Store large files from as many sites

When choosing your host, pay attention to the proposed server:

1. A shared server will be shared with other sites, so yours should be small and not have too much traffic
2. A dedicated server will only contain your site and it is the ideal solution if you expect to receive a lot of traffic and/or if you have many files to put online.

2. Avoid accumulating plugins and widgets

When designing a website we are often tempted to add many features in the form of plugins and widgets. It's even easier with a CMS like WordPress.

If these small additional options seem to facilitate the navigation of the Internet user and improve his experience within the site, this is not the case for the loading speed.

On the contrary, each widget, even the simplest one, reduces the performance of your site . Limit the number of plugins installed.

If forms and analytical code seem to take up little space, this is not really the case in the back-end. Even if few lines of code appear, your forms and analytical code should share space with plugins.

All together, you understand that the space is shrinking visibly and that loading your site in less than 2 seconds will be difficult.

3. Minimize HTTP Requests

The loading time of a web page depends on the images, files and scripts to be loaded and displayed. However, an HTTP request is made for each of these elements.

Before reducing the number of requests, you need to know how many requests your page has. You can find the answer directly in Google.

Right-click on the page, click on “Inspect” then go to the “Network” tab:

Minimize HTTP Requests

• The “Name” column shows you all the files on the web page
• The “Size” column indicates the size of each file
• The "Time" column specifies the time it took to load the file

In the bottom left corner you see the total number of requests that have been made.

To reduce this number, ask yourself if each uploaded file is necessary. If not, you can remove it from your page.

4. Reduce CSS code

A line of code takes up space and increases the weight of your files as well as the loading time of your site. Everything you write should be useful and effective.

At first, reduce the use of selectors, remove spaces, remove unnecessary css , and remove unnecessary comments. In the same way, go to the essential in your code with short formulations.

5. Combine and Minimize File Size

Always with the aim of reducing HTTP requests, you can work on the weight of your files. Start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

You can minify their code to remove unnecessary formatting, indentations, and spaces. Specific tools exist such as Minify .

Also, if you have multiple CSS or JavaScript files try combining them into a single file. Your page will have fewer components to load and therefore fewer requests to make.

6. Defer loading the JavaScript file

To defer a file means to load it after the other elements of the web page have been displayed.

A JavaScript file being sometimes heavy, it may be a good idea to do so. This way, your page load time is not slowed down: your main content is displayed in an extremely short time.

7. Allow Caching

When you visit a website, the elements of the page consulted are stored in a cache on your hard disk or in temporary memory.

This means that the next time you visit that same site, your browser will load the page without making any HTTP requests. The main components are already stored on your side.

Most visitors to your site arrive with an empty cache. It is therefore essential that you activate caching to significantly reduce the loading time of your site during a next visit.

On WordPress you can use the W3 Total Cache plugin . You can also go through your .htaccess file by adding the following lines of code:

Allow Caching

8. Use a CDN

When your site is hosted on a single server, every user who visits your site sends requests to that same server. Thus, in case of heavy traffic the time required to process each request increases, slowing down the loading time of your site for all users.

Also, if your server is in France but a user is in Australia, your site will be slower for the latter. The information needed to display the page is further away and takes longer to load.

To overcome all these problems, it is advisable to use a CDN – Content Delivery Network.

With CDN, you cache your site on a global network of servers. This way, when a user visits your site, requests are sent to the server closest to their location.

9. Use external storage platforms

In addition to hosting your site's files on a CDN, you can place them on external hosts, especially if they are videos or large files.

Let's take an example: you have made a video tutorial and you want to integrate it into your site. This file is heavy because your video is several minutes long.

Instead of uploading it directly to your site via an FTP client or the WordPress editor, it's better to host it on YouTube or Vimeo.

You can then embed your video into your content using the <iframe> code.

10. Optimize Images

This trick is well known and very effective. As you know, the larger the weight of your image, the more the weight of your web page increases and the longer it will take to load.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Choose the right format : You must use PNG format if your image contains a logo, icons, text or illustrations. In other cases, opt for the JPG. However, never use the Tiffs and BMPs formats.
2. Resize your images : your images will look better if their size is adapted to the content of your page. On Codeur's blog, for example, the images do not exceed 800 px wide.
3. Compress your images : do not compress your images in JPG beyond 60-70% at the risk of losing quality.

To compress images for a retina screen, increase the size of your image by 150 to 200% then compress it to 30-40%.

Our tip to improve the loading time of your site

Whatever the importance of the information contained in your website, it is clear that an optimal loading time at the opening of the page is much more important in the eyes of visitors! The main thing will therefore be to boost it so that you can get the maximum traffic and position yourself at the top of Google's search engines.

To achieve this goal, the ideal would be to apply all the above tips without neglecting anything! Indeed, each element to reduce the speed will bring its weight to the competitive level, and each advice will therefore benefit you.