How to upgrade an old website into a high-speed project?

How to upgrade an old website into a high-speed project?

A Brief Overview of Google’s Mission to Speed ​​Up the Web

In 2009, Google announced its ambitious goal to “speed up the web” and called on website owners to optimize their resources to improve loading speed.

In 2010, the company announced that loading speed would be a key factor in the search engine’s desktop ranking algorithms, meaning that fast-loading sites would have an SEO advantage.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile devices had surpassed desktop searches, a trend that continues to accelerate. According to the latest data, 61% of Google searches were made on mobile devices in 2019.

This dominance of mobile search has led to the launch of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which aims to motivate site owners to create simplified versions of their pages that meet strict performance standards.

Comparing Responsive and AMP Themes for Mobile

Many website owners and SEOs have expressed dissatisfaction with the need to consider page speed and AMP among the 200+ ranking factors. However, speed remains one of the most important aspects to consider. In 2017, Google conducted a study that confirmed their commitment to improving web speed: “When page load time increases from 1 to 10 seconds, the likelihood of a user abandoning a mobile site increases by 123%.”

In July 2018, page speed was officially introduced as a ranking factor for mobile search, and today Google is adding even more metrics related to this aspect, such as Core Web Vitals.

With the average user attention span decreasing and dependence on mobile devices increasing, page speed remains critical for website owners.

How to Optimize Your Website for Speed

Think Like a Racer

Winning the page speed race is like winning a car race: your site needs to be lightweight, powerful, and manageable.

Comparing it to a race car can simplify the methods for optimizing page speed.

Keep it Light

Modern websites are becoming more beautiful and functional, but this, unfortunately, leads to their weight increasing. Many of them resemble limos or party buses, overloaded with unnecessary features, making them slow and heavy. On the “race track” of the Internet, such a site will not succeed.

To participate in the race for speed, you need a “race car”. Race cars do not have unnecessary elements, such as radios or cup holders. Likewise, your site should not be overloaded with complex animations, heavy images, and unnecessary plugins.

To reduce the weight of the site, you can:

Reduce the number of third-party scripts.

Choose a lighter theme with minimal fonts.

Implement AMP.

Optimize your images.

Compress and minify your code.

Optimize your database regularly.

Content management systems like WordPress offer optimization plugins like WP Rocket and Imagify that can help reduce the weight of your site.

Add Power

You wouldn’t install a golf cart engine in a race car, so why host your site on cheap shared hosting? While paying more for quality hosting may seem like an unnecessary expense, it’s actually necessary for your site to run successfully.

Traditional shared hosting plans can host many sites on a single server, which can leave your project under-resourced. If you’re serious about it, consider upgrading to a better host, such as a managed WordPress host like WP Engine or Flywheel.

If managed hosting isn’t right for you, consider a VPS (virtual private server) plan for increased computing power and control over your hosting environment.

Drive Efficiently

A lightweight and powerful racing car cannot run without an experienced driver. This also applies to loading web pages. Every element of your site is a turn that the browser needs to “drive” around.

When loading a web page, the browser goes through a process of “coloring” the data. Optimizing this process can significantly improve loading speed. For example, caching allows you to compile code in advance, which reduces latency.

Various types and levels of caching can be implemented using plugins and CDNs (content delivery networks), which not only cache data, but also host it on servers around the world, which helps minimize loading times.

Optimizing for Core Web Vitals

Optimizing for the new Core Web Vitals (Maximum Content Rendering, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Drift) significantly improves page loading speed.

In Conclusion

Optimizing page loading speed is not an easy task, but it is vital to achieving high positions in search engines. As a website owner, you are in this race, so do everything you can to make your site a real race car and not a golf cart!

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