It’s likely that you have performed some type of on-site speed audit before or seen one done online. Performing a complete technical audit on your site can ensure that you will improve its ranking. Performing these audits regularly will help you to address various problems that could be affecting your page and make sure that you can see small incremental changes which will lead to better rankings over time.

There can be speed issues on almost any webpage and as we use tools to perform on-site audits we can figure out ways that a page could be optimized to improve page speed and eventually its ranking as well. Most major speed changes on a site come from introducing a wide range of small changes but there are some excellent ways that you can make a large difference in your site speed with some dramatic and outside of the box improvements.

Here are four outside the box tips that you can use to properly optimize your page and improve your site speed quickly!

Optimize Images With SVG

Optimizing and condensing images on your page means your entire page will be indexed and load faster. SVG images are becoming increasingly more popular for image optimization on webpages. SVGs have been one of the most popular choices for optimization because it can scale down an image size and make sure that it loads on any device in a clear format. SVG images are vectors and they are often used for items like icons on a page. The nice thing about icons is that they can be some of the smallest images that are loaded on a webpage. As many icons are well under 2 kb, you can have a webpage that loads images that are less than 10kb. Compressing down your images to this format can produce overwhelming results with page speed especially if you had fairly simple images to start with that could be vectorized easily.

Using HTML Over JavaScript:

Some of the best functionality for search engine crawling and loading web pages quickly comes from ditching JavaScript libraries and changing over to HTML 5. You can install a number of features to your website through HTML 5 that are not typically available through JavaScript. Using the data list element instead of a drop-down JavaScript box can improve site functionality and introduce an interface that’s better for smartphones. The data list element on HTML 5 is also significantly faster than any JavaScript element.

HTML 5 also has built-in detailed and summary tags which are designed to improve functionality while removing many of the overheads that are present with JavaScript in linking. The big problem with having JavaScript elements on your page is that it increases the number of trips to the server that are required to load your page. New HTML 5 elements can also improve the functionality of your page and compatibility with a larger number of devices.

Networking And Improvements

Every browser needs to collect resources for your page from a server and this means sending those resources out over the Internet.  Finding a way to reduce the distance of requests and the total number of trips that need to be made across the server can create massive speed improvements. Using TLS 1.3 standard for SSL security can work at reducing the number of trips that are required for encryption technology. This newest standard reduces the number of trips down to one and this can shave milliseconds off of the initial connection time for your website. If you’re still running TLS 1.2, the upgrade in security can make a massive difference. Behind-the-scenes upgrades in HTTP 2 and emerging standards in Quick+ HTTP/3 can also work at reducing connection trips.

Using smart routing features can also help to improve your speed if you are on cloud flare or an AWS service. Many large companies are doing this to introduce a more secure and private connection.

CSS

Introducing CSS elements can require a bit more coding but it often leads to improvements for reusing images that have already been loaded, maximizing on page interactions and more. You can optimize how many files need to be loaded the first time that your pages are visited, you can add in CSS animations to require less resources than JavaScript and also implement a number of interactive UI elements that will not affect your page speed.

If you are interested in improving your page speed by taking advantage of some of these solutions, contact us today!