Page speed is how fast one page on a site loads. It is one of the most important criteria for ranking search engine results. It’s also crucial to keeping users engaged with your content.

Best practice is for a page to load in three seconds or fewer. Any longer, and you risk losing most of your audience. You can check page speed using Pingdom’s Speed Test or Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

We’ve included a few simple ways to improve your page speed below:

Use smaller images

Images are often the largest files on a page. Save some load time by compressing them with a program like photoshop. Which file format you use depends on the kind of image; generally, JPG is best for photos, and PNG for graphics and text.

Allow fewer ads

Ads, though a steady source of income, require significant resources to load. You can make your page load faster, and improve user experience, by removing a few of them.

Enable caching

Ever load a page when you’re not connected to the internet? Your browser probably stored instructions on how to load it during a previous visit. When you are connected, caching makes it faster for you to load pages you visit often. If your webhost doesn’t have a method to enable caching, you can do it with a quick edit to your .htaccess file.

Host videos on your site’s server

Pulling information from several sources can really slow a browser down. Consider hosting videos and other large media on your site’s own server, instead of embedding them.