Recently, Google announced that website load time will be considered in their ranking algorithms. This means that if your web form takes too long to load, your rankings might get worse. 

If you are looking for ways to get better rankings for your web form landing pages, check the following tips to reduce your load times.

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1. Check the Web Form’s Landing Page Current Speed

You can do this using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. It will give you a comprehensive breakdown of how long and what needs improving and steps to take to speed up your web form. The reports generated by this tool are good for providing a bird’s eye view on things but if you want to dig deeper, you can use Web Page Test.

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If you're just getting started, here are 3 tools for checking site speed:

• Pingdom - offers an easy-to-use site speed test that mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. This allows you to see if your page is effectively optimizing for responsive design, your stylesheets are well organized, and your HTML code is well written. 

• GTmetrix - Get a waterfall breakdown of resources and a page summary report on user perceived speed. You can test your site in 22 countries and get the ever so important metric for SEO -  Core Web Vitals, checked out too. 

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• Web Page Test - is another tool to help you find out if your website is running slow and what your CWV (Core Web Vital) Score is. (Largest Contenful Paint - LCP, Cumulative Layout Shift - CLS and Total Blocking Time -TBT.

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2. Optimize Your Images

If you are not aware of which file format to use for your images, it’s important to understand that different file formats can dramatically change the size of an image without affecting the visual quality. It is also necessary to make sure your images are optimized correctly by following some simple rules to ensure you get optimal results.

• GIF - If your image has few colours, you can use GIF for it.

• JPG - is the best choice for images with many colours like people, photos, videos or wallpapers. 

• PNG - is a good option for high quality transparency and it’s among the most widely supported image formats.

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If you don’t have access to expensive image software like Adobe Photoshop, you can use Pixlr, a free online image editing program. For quick image compression and optimization, try Kraken. 

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3. Compress and Optimize Your Page Content

Compressing your web form's content can have a huge impact on reducing your web form load times. By default, when a browser loads a web page, it has to download all the files from your server before the page will appear in your browser window. 

With image files, in particular, you have to wait for each image file to download before the browser can continue loading the page. By letting a Content Delivery Network (CDN) take care of your files hosting, you files get closer to the users since it’s dispersed over a global server network, and thus faster loading time. 

The best ways to combine and speed up your website are: 

• Connect Cloudflare DNS Hosting for faster DNS lookups and CDN
• Use a CDN, either via Cloudflare or Fastly, CDN77 or StackPath
• Use Cache Plugins for Wordpress like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.

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