Google Search Central recently featured a video blog on their ongoing YouTube series SEO Made Easy entitled “3 Ways to Improve Page Speed”. SEO Made Easy is an ongoing YouTube series that offers optimization tips to help improve your website content and make your site more SEO friendly. Google Search Central (formally Google Webmasters) offers optimization tips for business owners, SEO professionals, and Web Developers.

Image Optimization Has the Potential to Offer Substantial Improvements to Website Performance

Martin Splitt, a developer advocate for Google search makes the case that image optimization can have a major impact on your websites performance. Embracing modern formats like WebP or proper JPEG encoding of your images can not only improve your websites SEO performance, but also your user experience with faster load times.

The problem with many images on slow-loading sites, is that they are too large or too high quality. Keep in mind the larger or more detailed an image is, the larger the file size. This can become cumbersome for your end user in the form of increased load times waiting for images to download as your site loads.

There are a variety of tools and plugins you can use to optimize images for your website. Squoosh.app is a free tool recommended by the video that can be used to optimize your images. According to Squoosh “Faster images mean faster load times. Squoosh can reduce file sizes and reduce load times”. When optimizing your images it’s important to use tools like lighthouse and page speed insights before and after optimization to see the impact on your site’s performance.

Take Time to Audit Your Website’s Third Party Plugins and Scripts

Many websites utilize plugins or third-party scripts to achieve functionality on their sites. These plugins and third-party scripts typically add their own overhead in the form of added CSS files, additional scripts, and dependencies. All of this can translate to unnecessary bloat, especially if the plugin or script is no longer needed.

This can be particularly troublesome if you have a DIY WordPress site or worked with a less sophisticated developer who used DIY platforms and techniques like elementor, page builders, or Divi. It’s not that these themes or plugins don’t have their place, but in the wrong hands, they can generate poorly optimized sites that are bogged down with long loading times.

Google lighthouse has a section in it’s report for unused javascript which can help you identify and eliminate unnecessary third-party plugins and scripts

Utilize Lazy Loading on Below-The-Fold Web Content

Perhaps hinting at just how large an impact images can have on your web performance, the last optimization tip focuses on lazy loading below-the-fold images and iframes. Below-the-fold refers to content that is not immediately visible when a user loads your website.

For a site not utilizing a lazy loading approach, all content (whether visible to the user or not) must be transferred to the end user before loading the page. This can bog down your site’s performance and add substantial time to your site’s load time, especially if your site is filled with images, videos, and iframes.

For non-technical users utilizing lazy loading can be more challenging. For developers, there are a few easy-to-implement techniques to achieve this functionality

• Adding loading=lazy attribute to HTML elements such as images and iframes
• For videos, you can add preload=”auto” and add a poster image (optimized of course) placeholder
• Other content like lists of products or articles will require a web developer to implement a custom lazy-loading solution

Speed Optimization Work Will Continue to Be an Ongoing Effort

“How can I make my website faster?” Is a common question we’ve been asked many times over the years by prospective clients. It’s clear from Google’s tips that true speed optimization is an ongoing process. While efforts like lazy loading can long-lasting have sitewide impacts, If you are not optimizing your images as you continue to create new content – you’re back at square one.

Web performance and speed optimization is a complex issue that can impact the web design, SEO, and even PPC performance of your site. Need help optimizing your site? Contact us to discuss your needs.