Improving page speed is an important part of SEO optimization. Page speed is not to be confused with “website speed” or “site speed.’ While page speed is the page load time of a specific page or the time it takes for your browser to receive the first byte from a web server, the site speed is the page speed of a sample of page views on a website.
The site speed and page speed are signals that are used by Google algorithms to rank pages. Good page speed also improves a user’s experience on a website. Here’s how you can improve page speed in three easy ways:
1. Optimize the size: Use a software application to reduce the size of all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that are over 150 bytes. When using a software application like Gzip, ensure you use this to compress only text. All images must first be compressed on a different program, such as Photoshop, that allows you to have control over the quality of all the images.
2. Refined coding: Optimize page speed by optimizing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML codes. This includes removing commas, spaces, and other characters that you can do without. There are various plugins available for this type of optimization like Autoptimize, Litespeed Cache, WP Optimize etc.
3. Redirects: Bring down the number of redirects you have on a page. Whenever a page redirects you to another page, you must wait for more time for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. So, if you have two redirects on a single page, that drastically reduces the page speed and makes that page load slower.