Have you ever had that feeling that you want to close the tab just because it takes ages to load?
Time to consider optimizing your website page speed then!
In this article we’ll give you some tips on how to achieve a better page speed, thus guarantee a great user experience for your site visitors, and why not, improve your SEO.
Remember, Google pays attention to the page speed when it comes to ranking your site!
To get started, you can evaluate your page speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights.
Simply enter your site URL and get hints on what needs to be improved.
Luckily, SpringBuilder takes care of such serious stuff as rendering blocking JS, leveraging browser caching, enabling compression, minifying CSS and JS, and improving server response time, thanks to Cloudflare.
We assume that you have already connected your website to Cloudflare. If not, we strongly recommend doing so, otherwise, this article won’t help you in your optimization endeavors.
Please follow these step-by-step guides to improve your website's overall performance on SpringBuilder:
Select your website in the ‘Cloudflare Site Selection’ dropdown.
Go to the ‘Speed’ tab and in the ‘Auto Minify’ section tick Javascript, CSS, HTML
Scroll down to ‘Rocket Loader’ and enable it.
Now find the ‘Browser Cache Expiration’ section from the ‘Cache tab’ and choose 8 days (recommended) from the dropdown.
Now find the ‘HTTP Strict Transport Security' (HSTS) section from the ‘Crypto tab’, hit enable HSTS, and follow the steps on the wizard. On the second step, called ‘Configure’, enable all the options. Make sure to choose 1-month expiration in the section called ‘Max Age Header’ as well.
Now let’s try Pagespeed again to see if this improved the website speed. Simply go to Google's PageSpeed Insights and enter your website URL.
Optimizing images
The file size of the images does matter and may seriously affect your loading speed. The optimal size for website images is around 500-1000KB, so SpringBuilder has a restriction for uploading images to 5MB. If your image is too large by its pixels, use image editors, like Photoshop, to resize them to real sizes to further use them on your site. You can also opt for the Image Editor on your Media App to resize them on the go.
Mind the quality, though.
So here visual content compressing tools are a good option. We strongly recommend using online tools like TinyPNG, to reduce your PNG or JPG file size.
For gifs, you can go with Ezgif.
Lessening fonts
Well, using uniquely picked typography is a great way to improve text readability or highlight important text content. But too many different fonts will not only have a negative effect on your site’s overall design, but also the page speed. That’s why we recommend being careful with them, more than 3 fonts is already too much.
Solution: Remove all the unnecessary fonts from Dashboard > Fonts App. There is a tiny little indicator in the upper right corner of the Fonts App that displays how your existing fonts collection impacts your website speed.
That's it! With this much info, it’s time to get to work and do your best to make your site load as fast as the light. Keep an eye on your results and keep improving your visitors’ experience on your website.