My website is too slow to load. How can I fix it?

First, let’s understand why fixing loading issues is important.

Is page loading speed really important for SEO ?

The answer is... not that much. But having a slow website is an extremely negative signal for SEO.

So, once you make sure that your website loads pretty quickly, don’t spend too much time over optimizing this. Once your website is “regular” fast, you better spend time on crafting content, if SEO is your focus.

However, while it’s not that important for SEO, it is very important for conversion purposes. People will convert better if they’re not dragged down by slow loading pages at each step of the funnel.

So make sure to pick your priority, given your focus and your time. 

Fix page loading issues

The best tool to use here is Lighthouse: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse.

Run an audit of your website and it will give you the main issues you need to fix, along with a Performance score and SEO scores: 

Then, you’ll have to follow the opportunities to work on, so your website could load faster: 

90% of slow loading issues come from these mistakes :

• Image size
• Images lazy loading
• Special font files
• Unused scripts
• Javascript/ CSS file size
  

Here’s how to fix them:

• Use JPG instead of PNG. Especially for photographs and pictures, PNG files are way too large in size. You’ll gain back precious seconds with this alone. Unsure? At least, you should use https://tinypng.com/.
• Make sure to lazy load images. You might need the help of a developer for this but the goal is to make sure that you only load the images only if the user needs to see it (ie. has scrolled enough to actually see the image). There are several javascript libraries that can help you achieve this. Also, some CMS (Webflow, Shopify, Carrd) are actually letting you use it without code.
• If you are using special fonts on your website, make sure to use fallback swap fonts as well. Through this, the text will be displayed, before the font has been loaded completely. It provides a better experience to your users.
• Remove the scripts that are not used anymore — or those that are taking too long to load.
• Minify your JavaScript and CSS files.
  

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