What is Page Speed?

Page speed frequently gets mixed up with “site speed,” which actually refers to the page speed for a sample of views on a website. Page speed can be understood as either the “time to first byte” which refers to the time taken by your browser to get the first byte of data from the server.

When it comes to page rank, according to Google, one of the signals utilized by their algorithm is site speed (and consequently, the page speed). And research shows that when it comes to page speed, Google’s algorithm might be precisely gauging time to the first byte.

Moreover, slow page speed is going to result in search engines being able to crawl lesser pages within the allocated crawl budget. This could impact your indexation negatively. User experience is also affected by page speed. Pages that take a longer time to load are likely to have a lower average time spent on-page and a higher bounce rate.
You should try every possible thing to increase your website’s loading speed. Start by analyzing the web page’s size as a lot of websites tend to be bloated these days. Try getting rid of clutter as much as possible by compressing code, optimizing images and loading fewer ads and external scripts:

Enable compression

Use a file compression software such as Gzip to decrease the size of the HTML, JavaScript and CSS files that are greater than 150 bytes.

Compress the code

Compressing the code as well as removing commas, spaces and any other unnecessary characters can help increase the page speed dramatically. Also get rid of formatting, unused code and code comments.

Decrease redirects

Every time you are redirected from one page to another, it takes more time for the HTTP request-response cycle to finish. For instance, if the pattern for a mobile redirect goes from sample.com-> www.sample.com -> m.sample.com -> m.sample.com/home, the additional redirects cause the loading time of the page to increase.

Optimize images

Make sure that the images used on the site are in the correct format, not larger than they are required to be and are adequately compressed.

Utilize CSS sprites to make a template for images frequently used on the site such as icons and buttons. It combines all the images into a single large image that loads as one and shows only the parts you want to be visible, meaning lesser HTTP requests.

Utilize CDNs

CDNs or Content distribution networks is a network of proxy servers that delivers web content based on the user’s geographic location, the content delivery server and the source of the webpage. Basically, a copy of your site is stored in various, geographically distributed group of data centers which enables faster access to the content on your site.

Take advantage of the browser cache

Browsers save a lot of data in their cache so when a user visits your website again, the browser does not need to load the whole page again. You can utilize tools like YSlow to set the expiration date for how long you want the information to be stored in the cache.