 Today we're talking about page loading optimization here on The Journey. When it comes to your site's performance, page speed is probably one of the most important factors when you think about the people who's going to end up visiting and looking at it. However, unless you really understand how this metric works and more specifically all the pieces that fit together to make it faster, you might find it difficult to improve. So web page loading speed is a crucial part of your site's usability. In fact, Google considers page speed as one of the 200 ranking factors that influence a website's position in organic search results. And it also affects the user experience as well. In this video, we're going to talk about what page speed is, why it's important and how you're going to actually measure it. Then we're going to give you some quick solutions that you can use to improve your page loading speed right now. So first off, you might be asking yourself, what is page speed? Well, basically page speed is how quickly your content loads when someone visits a page on your site. Not to be confused, though, with website speed. That's a different thing. Page speed represents the loading time of a specific page. Exactly. And there's a ton of factors that can really put the brakes on your performance, such as bad hosting, website server configuration, large images and videos, the huge culprit, just other media files contain on the page itself, as well as network latency or how long it takes the content to travel from the server to your browser. The good news is that you have control over all these things, at least to some extent. Now let's get into why page speed is important. One word comes to mind, impatient, as people are an impatient group and pages with longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates, meaning people just click off to another site. They abandoned it rather than engaging with yours. And actually studies show it only takes five seconds for people to get bored or frustrated with your slow moving site. And hey, not all bounces are necessarily due to page load speed, as some users might just go to your site and then just leave, right? But really to reduce that bounce rate and increase visitor engagement, it's essential that your website loads fast and seamless for them. Also really important, Google loves faster sites. So if your site is faster, Google is going to rank you higher. And to compliment that, having faster page load times can also boost the website crawl rate. So the faster the pages can be loaded, the more pages Google can crawl at one time. High page speed can also increase your site's crawl demand, meaning Google will want to crawl more pages. That's right. And another reason page speed matters is the perception the customer might have of your brand. If it takes a long time to load, it might come off as then, oh, this brand is unprofessional. And yeah, and if you really want to run that highly effective website, it's necessary to focus on optimizing the page speed. Julie, the first step in doing that is figuring out how your pages are currently performing, which is a great segue to figure out how we actually measure this. So I personally use the Google page speed inside or developer tools that they offer. It's an easy to use tool. You put it in the URL, hit submit, and they're going to give you a couple of different scores based on your website's overall performance, as well as give you areas of opportunity that you have to improve and information on how to do that. So if they say, you should really preload these requests and you're like, I don't know what that means. There's a little help guide that kind of goes with it to teach you how to do that. Awesome, Naly. Now that you understand the importance of page speed and also how to test it, we're going to jump into some key metrics on how to improve it. Start with choosing a performance optimized hosting solution. Again, the quality of hosting is one of the most important factors when it comes to your page speed. And you can really only tweak your server settings by so much of the memory allocated, the connection type, the speed, how many sites on the same server and other factors like this. So having that, that hosting that's optimized for your needs is a must. And it's kind of the old adage of you get what you pay for. Now you don't have to go out and buy like a hundred dollars a month type of server, but I try to go with an average range that really fits your website's needs. Next up, you want to eliminate any unnecessary plug-in. So arguably the easiest step to speed up a WordPress site is to deactivate and delete any unnecessary plug-ins. So from there, you can try to selectively disable plug-ins to see if one of them is significantly affecting your site's performance. If so, go ahead and swap it out for a different one or contact the developer for support. Yeah, I had a client that needed help optimizing their page speed. And I jumped into the WordPress dashboard and I saw that there were 57 plug-ins installed and active. When I asked them, what are they using these for? They went, I don't know. I just started installing it. They sounded pretty cool at the time. We got it down to, I think, 13 or 14 and the site was instantly faster. So those plug-ins make a big difference. Another thing that you can want to kind of keep in mind is the images and other media that's on your website. Everyone loves to have that crisp, high quality image on their website to really make it pop, but they can also slow sites down. And many WordPress users aren't really aware that having those high resolution images that can actually reduce them through the help of plug-ins or even other third party sites. So you can either use the plug-in smush or a Magify and it's automatically going to compress those images without reducing a lot of the quality. And one of the reasons why I do like using smush is it brings in another awesome optimization tip when it comes to your website and that's lazy loading. So what this is, it's only going to load the images that are in the view of the person or about to be in the view of the person. So you can have a website that is a mile long, but it's only going to load the first few sets of images and let the rest kind of load as they will. So that way a user isn't waiting for the rest of the site to catch up. So super simple way to do that. And it's all done through a single plug-in. Now I want to talk about reducing your redirects. Too many redirects to no surprise on your website can really hurt your page loading times. So every time a page has to redirect somewhere else, it prolongs the HTTP request and response. Of course, in some cases, redirects may be necessary, such as when you're moving to a new domain, that's a necessary redirect. However, eliminating unnecessary redirects on your site can result in significantly lower page loading times. And going back to the Google PageSpeed test, it'll actually show you if you have some of these redirects happening and if you can avoid it, it'll give you the direct URLs and links. So you can kind of start to track down and investigate if this is necessary to have these or if you can just get rid of them all together. But next up, we have one of the most important things to do when it comes to a website and that is to cache it. So caching is one of the most effective ways to really speed up your website. So caching stores copies of your website files. So if you think about a WordPress site, if you've ever gone into the file structure in the database, there is a ton of files being referenced each and every time. So going to the index file reaches out to a bunch of other files, calls the database, does all these different things. Caching basically creates little static copies of the website. So it's just nice, one nice and easy thing to download versus a million things that has to do, which ends up speeding up the website since there's less that that server has to do. And there are various ways that you can set up caching with your website. I would highly recommend using a plugin if you're using WordPress, such as like W3 Total Cache or WP Speed. There's a bunch of different ones. Or if your hosting provider has some type of like managed WordPress solution like GoDaddy or WP Engine, there's usually some type of caching built in to where you don't even need an extra plugin to accomplish this. This is a steady and forget it job. Your website performance is something that's crucial to go back to whether you're doing an e-commerce business, a blog or some type of portfolio online. And now rather than constantly running your website through different speed checkers, you can use a performance monitoring tool to keep an eye on things for you. And when a slowdown strikes, you'll be notified and can take action right away. But this is a lot of steps, but I don't want you to stress. You can do this at your own pace. Attack one thing at a time when it suits you with your business. I know you're running around wearing multiple hats, do what you can and just continually to work on it and continue to improve. These these couple of tweaks that we've talked about can really shave off milliseconds here or there. And I hope that what we covered today helps you and your website. And if it did, give us a like and drop a comment below. And be sure to subscribe so you're the first to know when our next video comes out. This is a journey.