SEO and page weight: How to optimize?

What it the page weight?

When we talk about "page weight ", we mean the weight of a page and of its necessary resources to be displayed. It included the HTML code of the page, styles (CSS files), scripts or plugins and images and/or videos. The users needs to download all these elements before the page can be correctly displayed. 

When we talk about " page weight", we mean the downloaded weight of all files. This is the volume of all the data that might slow down the page display. This weight must be distinguished from the real weight of files in cases which there is a files compression (the server compresses files before sending them to the customer in order to reduce the weight to download without changing the weight of files). 

How to reduce a page weight? 

We recommend to avoid exceeding a total weight of 4mb per page. 

1. Enable the compression

To compress files allows you to reduce the files weight to be downloaded without modifying their size. The compression allows you to win up to 80% of the data volume to download. You can enable the compresison on the configuration of our web server. This is a technical action requiring advanced knowledge. 

Read this article from Google in order to discover how to enable the compression of your pages.

You can check if your files are compressed in the page analysis > Speed. 

2. Get rid of unnecessary downloads

Websites often include numerous files (puglins, styles, scripts, etc) while these resources are not used on all pages. When you want to optimize the weight to download, you need to reduce the number of resources to download. 

You can find all the downloaded resources in Performance > Speed. 

3. Optimize the weight of images

Images often represent the bigger volume of data to download. In some cases, images are downloaded in high definition while they are displayed in small size. You can resize the image thanks to a photo editing software.

Find all the recommendations linked to the optimizations of images from Google.

If you want to check the weight of your images, refresh your page analysis just by clicking on the "refresh" button at the top right of your analyses.