In today’s digital age, having a fast-loading website is crucial for providing a good user experience and increasing conversion rates. With Google confirming that Core Web Vitals are used in its ranking systems, it’s more important than ever to optimize your website’s speed. If you’re ready to make your website fast in the year 2024, here are seven effective strategies to enhance its speed.
The first strategy is to analyze a network request waterfall for your website. This visualization can provide valuable insights into what happens when someone opens your website, such as which resources are downloaded, when they start loading, and how long each request takes. By understanding this information, you can identify the highest-impact optimizations for your website.
To interpret a waterfall, look for three key milestones in the loading process. The first milestone is the Time to First Byte (TTFB), which represents the minimum value for the First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores. The second milestone is render-blocking requests, which are important resources that need to load before page content becomes visible. The third milestone is the LCP, which is the largest content element on the page. Analyzing these milestones can help you optimize the FCP and LCP metrics.
The second strategy is to load the most important content first. Less important content shouldn’t take bandwidth away from more important requests. You can prioritize the LCP image by ensuring it’s not lazy-loaded, using the fetchpriority attribute to mark it as high importance, or using a preload tag to help the browser load the image early.
The third strategy is to reduce the download sizes of key early requests. Larger files take longer to download, so it’s important to optimize their sizes. You can use modern image formats like WebP and Avif, use Brotli compression for text content, and analyze your HTML or CSS code to identify embedded images, fonts, and data.
The fourth strategy is to compare real user data to lab data. Google provides real user data for most websites through its PageSpeed Insights tool. Comparing this data to the results of lab-based tests can help you better understand what’s happening on your website. Lab tests often report worse metrics than real user data because they use slower network connections and CPUs.
The fifth strategy is to check how your website performance has changed over time. Google’s Chrome User Experience report (CrUX) includes historical data that can show you when a problem was introduced and help you identify the root cause. You can view historical Core Web Vitals data for your website by running a DebugBear Core Web Vitals test and checking the Web Vitals tab for a 25-week trend.
The sixth strategy is to set up continuous website speed monitoring. This allows you to catch regressions as soon as they happen and identify their causes. DebugBear is a monitoring service that provides both lab-based testing and real-user monitoring.
The seventh and final strategy is to look at metrics beyond load time. While the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric measures the initial loading speed, Google also considers how quickly a website responds to user interactions. This is measured by the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric, which became a Core Web Vital on March 12. Improving INP requires real user monitoring (RUM) data, which can tell you which pages have slow INP, what elements users are interacting with, and what scripts are contributing to delays.
In conclusion, optimizing your website’s speed is crucial for providing a good user experience and improving conversion rates. By following these seven effective strategies in the year 2024, you can enhance your website’s speed and stay ahead in the competitive online landscape. Remember to analyze your website’s network request waterfall, load the most important content first, reduce download sizes, compare real user data to lab data, check performance changes over time, set up continuous monitoring, and look at metrics beyond load time. With these strategies, your website will be faster and more efficient than ever before.
