The amount of time it takes to load a webpage can impact a couple of important areas:
- Visitors will sometimes become impatient and leave a site before it even loads.
- Google can rank your page higher if the load time is considerably minimial.
So, you do not want a poor experience. And ranking higher in Google’s search is a definite plus. Here are some ideas to try:
Developer Tools
Using Chrome, you can inspect network traffic, profile Javascript, and a whole lot more. If you have not already used this awesome tool, start reading up on it now.
Here is the link on how to get started with Google’s Developer Tools.
Page Speed
Page Speed is a Google Developer Tools extension. It will read through your currently-loaded page and make suggestions on how to make the load time faster. For example, it might tell you do load Javascript asynchronously (as you will hear about in a bit) or serve images already scaled to the correct dimensions.
Here is the link to Page Speed Insights.
WordPress Plugins
If you are using WordPress as your CMS, there are a number of plugins that you could use to help speed things up. The following are the plugins that I have found most useful:
- Simple Optimizer: Removes unused content, alters revision storage count, and optimizes the database.
- WP Super Cache: Updates and serves static HTML pages, which can save considerable time on the initial page request.
- Asynchronous Javascript: Hooks into the enqueue_xxx calls to use <script async>, which can defer parsing.