How to make your website faster: 3 quick tips

MARTIN SPLITT: You can avoid those
by checking your internal links to make
sure they point to the new URL instead of the old one.
This way, users won't have to go through extra network round
trips and thus delays to get to your content.
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Website performance-- while being an important topic,
especially for your user experience,
it's a tricky one to wrap your head around, so let's dive in.
This one is quite a technical episode,
so if you are not working on the technical aspects of your site,
feel free to share this with your developers, as well.
First things first, Google Search
always seeks to show the most relevant content,
even if the page experience is not the best.
So page loading performance and also core web vitals
aren't as important as some people might think they are.
They are not irrelevant, though, but do not over
focus on these things.
We still think it helps to know a few quick tips to make
your sites faster for your users.
And one of the most common sources
of frustration and slow loading websites are JavaScript files.
This is something that developers
will have to look at as it requires knowledge
of how the code is structured and how the technologies
involved work together.
But JavaScript resources often are quite large,
and as they need to be parsed and executed,
they take browsers a while to process, too.
Try to reduce the usage of JavaScript,
considering techniques such as code splitting to only load
necessary parts of the code for each page and content hashing
to maximize caching of the files.
While this tip will require help from your developers
and is often not easy to do, it helps your users
by making your website significantly faster usually.
On to tip number two, avoid unnecessary redirects.
Now, some redirects are required, for example,
if you change domains or your site structure
has changed after a big migration.
This tip is primarily aimed at the accidental redirects,
though.
You can avoid those by checking your internal links
to make sure they point to the new URL instead of the old one.
This way, users won't have to go through extra network round
trips and thus delays to get to your content.
Last but not least, tip number three
is to optimize your images.
Optimizing images is a complex task,
but here are a few links to help you get started.
It ranges from something as simple as choosing
the right image file format and compression settings to more
complex changes like serving the right size for your user's
device and responsive images.
If you have images that are not on top of your pages
and immediately visible, also consider
using the loading equals lazy HTML attribute on these images
to get a performance boost when users open these pages.
If you want to learn more about making images on your pages
faster, check out our episode on that topic here.
So there you have it, three tips to make your site faster
for your users.
And again, while this won't directly
affect your site's performance in Google Search,
it surely will make your users happier.
Leave us a comment if you want more technical content on Google
Search Central and what other topics we should cover.
Thanks for watching this video, and see you soon.
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