Website page speed is the one of the easiest SEO win’s for your website. And in this article I am going to share with you exactly how I went from a 14 second page speed, to having my website page speed sit around 1 second.
Like most people who either start website businesses or buy them, I learnt a lot about SEO from day dot. I would write blogs, optimize them to get ranked and work on my overall onpage SEO, off page SEO and my page speed.
All until I discovered how incredibly powerful paid ads were for gaining sales and traffic for my ecommerce stores, and I then became fixated on that. Through that journey two things happened. One, I got insanely good ad paid digital marketing and secondly because of my fixation on this I had less focus on SEO for my own websites.
As my clients started buying more and more content websites that heavily rely on SEO. I decided to flex that SEO muscle of mine and go all in on learning the best SEO strategies from the best SEO’s online like Stephen Spencer, Matt Diggity and Bendan Tully just to name a few.
From doing so I discovered from multiple SEO’s and site speed specialists like Brendan Tully that optimizing your website for speed really is quite simple and a very easy win. In fact if a client of mine buys a site that is slow to load one of the first things we have them do is decrease that load speed.
Now after helping so many others it was my turn, and I decided that my 14 second page speed was not cutting it. So I made a goal, to half that page speed and the results turned out be even better.
How I Decreased My Page Speed
Firstly my hosting was terrible and I had a basic hosting plan ever since I started the business. So I upgraded from my original hosting through Hostgator who were notoriously slow, to a VPS (virtual private server) with Cloudways. Yes my monthly fee went up a few dollars but it was more than worth it because from just doing this, I achieved my goal and decreased my page speed 50% to a 7 second load time.
After sitting at that speed for a little while I was happy because I achieved my goal, however for anyone who knows me there is always more in the tank and I wanted nothing short of excellence. So 7 seconds was great, but it still didn’t cut it. That’s when I decided to revamp the website and take it from a javascript based theme to a CSS based theme and have it highly optimized for speed.
After 2 weeks from start to finish the new version of the website was ready and all bugs were ironed out. From changing the theme from the heavier Child theme on WordPress which was heavier on javascript to the Astra theme using mostly CSS, my site speed went down to around 2.5 seconds.
This was great! Not only did I love the new version of the site but it was so much faster and I had one last trick to pull out of the hat. This one was Ezoic’s Site Speed Accelerator tool, I had used the free version of this prior to updating my site’s theme and it gave me excellent results. So I wanted to plug it back in again to see if the tool could help me to go one step further.
Honestly though I had already done so much work to the website I had some doubts it wouldn’t move the needle too much, but the results were nothing short of excellence. Which is what I was striving for. Just by turning on the Site Speed Accelerator it actually halved my page speed time, and cut my page load time from 2.2 seconds to 1 second!
This was more than a 50% decrease in page speed and a better result than changing hosts, which actually amazed me.
Why Did These 3 Methods Work?
Well to start off with the hosting was an easy win because when you host on a shared server like I was and with a company who had a slow server as well. This means that the server doesn’t have enough capacity to load your website in a sufficient time frame because many other sites are sitting on that server as well. Hence why having a VPS with more storage and a faster host is certainty superior.
And we also know that by changing the website theme from a slow loading theme which was getting out dated, over to a newer faster loading theme that would give the site the freedom to load faster.
But the real question is, how exactly does the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator tool work?
Because I was curious. So I decided to do some digging and found that there are many things that this tool has going on in the background even though you just flick the switch to turn it on.
The first thing the tool does is optimize your site to load using Critical CSS which prevents your site from ‘jumping’ by not loading all different coding styles at once. It also removes any unused CSS on parts of the pages the users are not seeing and minifies your site so it loads faster.
The same goes with HTML, where Ezoic will minify html on your website where necessary to remove unnecessary white space, attributes, comments and any characters in html that the site isn’t using. All so the site can load the least amount of things for it to be operational and fast for the user.
As for image optimisation the tool does resize your site’s images depending on the screen size of the user to minimise transfer time but also keeps the image quality. Ezoic also has a feature which they call ‘lazy loading’ for images. Which is where if a user only scrolls halfway down one of your website’s pages, the tool will only load those images in the top half of the page that the user will see and not anything below that in which they won’t see. I like this because why waste loading something that is not going to be viewed and could only cause a poorer user experience in doing so?
Within each of these features there is more that goes on behind the scenes and I could write another whole article just on those, however understanding the key components I outlined above should help you to get an idea of what the Site Speed Accelerator can do for your website.
Personally I believe there are some huge wins with either of the 3 options I mentioned throughout this article. The least expensive in my opinion would be changing your hosting and if or once you have done that. Plugging your website into the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator is an easier and cheaper option than a site redesign, though for a long term play updating your site is a good idea too.
