Keep important pages under 1 MB
A website often consists of many thousands of different files, the structure and code files that determine how your website looks, functions, and defines its core features. On top of that, there is all the content of the website itself. Images, videos, audio, everything is part of your website and its content. It's important to bring this together to ensure that visitors can always reach your website quickly. And can navigate easily. Let's take a look at the load times of not only your main site, but also your most important pages.
What are your most important pages?
Identifying your most important pages can obviously be a good first step to start optimizing, because with every website there are pages that are more popular and more important. Whether it's because they're the best to find via the various search engines, or because they're the most promoted. You can easily identify the important pages if you use a statistics tool like Google Analytics or others. Just look at your page views and instantly see what percentage of your visitors land on which pages.
The most important pages are different for each website. For a blog site, this could be the most popular blog post; for an online store, this could be the most popular product that sells the most. So, take a close look at which pages are most important for your website and see if this all meets your expectations.
Take an inventory of what you have loaded
In order to make your most important pages available as quickly as possible, it's important to take stock of how they're already loading. Therefore, test the URL in a tool like Google PageSpeeds, and also test it locally. You can then take a screenshot of the results to review and check later.
The easiest way to see exactly what is loading on a page is still to take a look yourself using the built-in browser tools, which can be opened in Windows with F12, and then look under Network to see exactly what is loaded. And with a waterfall, you can immediately see which tasks are taking the most time. Often you can see bottlenecks here right away, for example images are too big or error messages appear in the code. You need to solve this problem to offer the fastest pages to your visitors.
Create fastest versions of your pages
To be able to create the fastest versions of your pages, it is advisable to look at your hosting package first. If you're not already using our SSD hosting, we recommend switching to it. For a small investment or additional cost, you will get more speed out of your hosting package and be able to run a better website on it. And you can take advantage of that.
A website, like any other component and file, has a total size. The overall file size of a site can affect many factors, with usability being a key component that can directly affect many different services. For example, for Google search engines, but also for your users' experience on the site itself. It is important that you take the appropriate steps as soon as possible.
In particular, you can check which sources are loaded and start streaming. Do you really need that one component externally? Or can you run it locally, for example?
It's also important to compress images as much as possible and make them suitable for use on a website. The new image format .WEBP can be a great help here. MijnHostingPartner.nl already supports the new file type, of course, you just need to add the MIME type. This can be done easily via the control panel. You can find out exactly how to do this in the knowledge base.
It is also important to use caching when using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla. There are several ways to store a static version of your most important pages that can be delivered. This will ensure that your website loads faster on all devices. And that you can therefore get your offer in front of customers' eyes faster here.
There is also a tool from Google (PageSpeeds) that allows you to see where improvements can be made. You can test this before and after the various works from this article. Then you will also see the impact this can have on loading times.
