Is your Weebly website slow? If yes, we need to work on that.
Wait, also, and if your website loads pretty quickly, can it be made even quicker – Every millisecond literally makes a difference. That’s why we’re publishing this article. Will simply explain how to speed up your Weebly website. We’ll get to that in a bit.
Before we dig more into the details and explain how you can make your website load a way faster, We will try to stress the importance of having a fast loading website.
Does Website Speed Matter?
Website load speed matters a great deal to ensure good search engine ranking and a great user experience. It is a known fact that Google’s search algorithm and most of the rest of the different search engines take into account your page load times as one of the many things while calculating page rank.
TYPES OF OPTIMIZATION – Speed Up a Weebly Website
There are two basic types of optimization for your Weebly website that you should focus on
- On Page Optimization
- Off Page Optimization
- PageBoost For Weebly
Will try to go through them so you have a better understanding speeding up your Weebly website.
Weebly On Page Optimization
This type of optimization revolves around the things you do directly on your website. For speeding up a Weebly websites load time these things include
- Fast loading templates/themes
- Properly formatted and optimized images
- Clean HTML and CSS
With the proper techniques and some cleaning of the clutter on your Weebly website, you can do a lot to speed things up. First let’s focus on the very basics of building your Website, the theme.
Themes are the groundwork of everything your website is based on and are the first elements that load for a Weebly website. To ensure you have a fast loading Weebly theme you have to make sure that it keeps certain load time variables correct.
- Keep things minimal if you can.
- Minimize the use of images and multimedia.
- Properly format images to the desired size, either with Microsoft paint or another tool and keep them as small as possible.
- Keep your HTML and CSS as clean and un-cluttered as you can. Try not to use too many add on-s.
- Utilize CSS effects for headers, backgrounds, and menus, instead of using full-size images.
Moral of the story, the more you have, the longer it takes to load. Following some simple disciplines in your websites creation can save you on load time.
Weebly Off Page Optimization
There are some simple on-page factors and practices to follow when building your website. Off page optimization factors for a Weebly website are a little trickier. Weebly has its hosting tied in with all of the other services it provides.
While Weebly offers a very efficient form of cloud hosting to customers it can still bog down on load times. Also, optimization becomes difficult because there is little you can do to tweak load time factors that have to do with your Weebly hosting.
The workaround I have found is to include your Weebly website into a content delivery network, or CDN for short. Content delivery networks make your website load faster by caching your website on their servers.
This allows the CDN to more efficiently deliver your websites data and in-turn gives you a quicker load time.
PageBoost For Weebly
By default, Weebly doses not support lazy loading. This can cause extremely slow websites and poor Core Web Vitals, hurting SEO. This PageBoost plugin for Weebly speeds things up by implementing proper lazy-loading across your site. The result? A faster, leaner website with better SEO.
How does it work?
It’s simple: instead of loading everything all at once, PageBoost only loads above-the-fold content at first. Then, as the user scrolls down your website, resources like images are seamlessly loaded in the background in a very smooth way.
PageBoost only loads the content that the user is looking at. As the user scrolls, more content is loaded smoothly in the background, without altering user experience.
The end result? Your website loads quicker and ranks better in core web vitals, resulting in stronger SEO scores, happier users, and a better overall website.
To get the Weebly PageBoost, Access this page and click on Plugins.
Note: PageBoost only works when used alongside with this selection of premium Weebly themes.
Great explanations… I must try it.
Great… How exactly I can clean the keap un-cluttered HTML and CSS?
Can you recommend which template is fastest ?
It is not just one page, but every page on my website that is incredibly slow to open (30+ second on computer; 45+ sec on phone).
Unfortunately, Cloud Flare caused a redirect loop and shut down my website after I changed to the Cloud Flare DNS addresses. The solutions offered on the Cloud Flare community did not work for me. So I went back to the GoDaddy DNS.
I removed all images from my most important page, cut the text in half (split it into 3 pages), simplified as much as possible. All with no effect. I have never had any add ons or used any unusual coding or themes.
The only thing I did not do is to use Weebly’s Domain transfer tool. It looks like such a transfer is more or less permanent. At this point I am looking into Weebly alternatives so I don’t want to do that.