How to Improve Wix Website Speed Under 20 Minutes?

What is Wix?

[Updated - June 2, 2021]

Building your own website is nothing new in 2021. Creating a website 20 years ago would be such a big deal as it was a multi-step operation. You need to gather customer's requirement (i.e: research website goals), planning, designing, developing, testing, and maintenance.

Today, building a custom website from a framework is a luxury as it is very expensive and it takes a long time due to its nature of multi-step operation. We have started to see the trend of building a website using a website builder since 2013. We have approximately over 50 website builders altogether, and Wix is the number one website builders following by Webflow, Editor X, Squarespace, Shopify, Elementor, etc.

Wix has the most active user to this day, more than 180 million users in 190 countries. Many people choose website builder like Wix over Wordpress and custom website simply because of its ease of use. Wix is super easy to use and anyone can build a free website with Wix. However, due to its easy customizibility, people tend to put many unnecessary features that Wix offers, in which slow their website speed down. How can you improve the website speed?

Update: The methods used in this article can be appplied to any other website builders out there, and certainly is Editor X.

Why is website speed important?

Website speed has relatively high impact on website SEO. When your website takes too long to load, users tend to click back. Hence, your high Bounce Rate. Google assesses your page speed and rank you in the search engine, the faster your site loads, the higher the rank.

In this article, Socialectric will show you the top 5 important steps that you can use to improve your Wix website speed (or any website speed)! But first, make sure you test your Wix website with Wix Website Speed Test to see how good/bad your site speed is. If your website can loads around 3 seconds, then you're all good. You can also use SpeedTest tool to test your local Internet.

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Important: Wix uses a Content Delivery Network which is an interconnected system of cache servers in different geographical locations. Web content is delivered from the closest cache server. This system allows your site to load faster.

Wix currently tests and offers support for the following mobile devices and browsers:

Supported operating systems on mobile devices

 iPhone: iOS 12 and above (iPhone 6 and above)

 Android: 9.0 and above

Supported browsers on mobiles devices

Google Chrome  | Safari 

"You should keep in mind that some design decisions, which seemingly enhance visitor experience may affect your page loading time. Having said that, there are ways to optimize the usage of these features to create a stunning looking and high performing site." - Wix

Test Wix Sites with GTMetrix

GTMetrix is a website performance analytics tool, powered by Lighthouse, delivering page performance test results that better reflect the user’s perception of how fast their websites are loading. Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for measuring the quality of web pages.

Whether you are using Wix or any other platforms, GTMetrix is currently the most popular website performance testing tool out there. It is free and their reports are very comprehensive and easy to follow.

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How to improve Wix website speed under 20 minutes?

1. High quality images

Wix offers automatic image optimization where you can upload a 25MB file size and Wix will resize the images for you on their end. However, we did not see much improvement on our Wixsite, so we took the matter into our own hand and optimize our images before uploading them to Wix server.

We use tinyjpg and tinypng to optimize our images. They will talk more about different image extension types later. You only need to upload your chosen images to them, and they will compress your images as small as possible but also keep its quality. Images that are typically under 300Kb seems to improve site speed significantly.

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Before you start modifying your images, make sure you’ve chosen the best file type. There are several types of files you can use:

• PNG – produces higher quality, lossless, and transparent background images, but also has a larger file size
• JPG – uses lossy and lossless optimization. You can adjust the quality level for a good balance of quality and file size
• SVG – Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation. SVG image remains crisp and clear at any resolution or size

Take away:

• Use PNG format when you want transparent images
• If there is no need for transparent images, use JPG images for better compression (lower file size)
• Image dimension should be cropped to fit designated image placeholder. There is no need to use a 4K image where the placeholder is only 200 px
• Wix let you upload SVG (Illustration). Use this format for icons.

2. Animations

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We know that you or your clients want a super duper website with all these flashy animation on your texts and images. However, it is also the number one culprit that slow your website down.

If you want to make your website not as boring and still able to use animation, we suggest that you don't add any animation on the above the fold (the section that loads first when your visitors come to your page) and only add one animation for every whole section (not different animation per line of text).

This way, you can optimize the page speed when your visitors first land on your homepage. When they scroll down, each section will animate to the screen which makes the website more interactive.

In late 2020, Wix released their new scroll animation that applies to strip background images.

Technical tips: Wix's built-in animations are JavaScript presets that are added to your site when you choose an animation for an element. JavaScript breaths life to your design, but it is often heavy. Wix does not provide the option to minify your JavaScript so you have to be mindful of what you should add to avoid speed issues.

3. External applications

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Wix store market has more than 300 web apps for you to choose. If you can't find the right app for your needs, you can also modify the source code with Wix Velo (formerly known as Wix Corvid). However, one main thing with this is that you are risking losing your page speed.

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External applications don't use Wix server, such as social media widgets, and they tend to eat up a lot of resources on your website. In addition, Wix caching also turns off when there is an unoptimized code (You can turn caching on automatically if you are a developer)

It takes a lot of time and resources to try to debug the problems with the code redesign the whole page again, so we will choose the latter. Don't add random codes or use market apps if you are not sure how they affect your site loading speed.

4. Fonts

Another culprit is the fonts. Most new Wix users or amateur website developers tend to use many fonts to make their websites look good. They cannot be more wrong. It makes their website more clutter and unorganized.

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Branding is the most important aspect of your company. When you build a brand, you tend to stick to two typefaces (or fonts for simplicity sake). One font is used for your title/headline, and the other one will be used for your description. Too many fonts used causes your site to look unreadable and less professional. Two fonts make it look sleek, clean, and light for your website.

5. Other media

Such as design elements and videos. They can make your website very interactive and beautiful, but they will cost you a lot of loading speed. Try to use texts as much you can, and may GIF instead of videos if you are trying to show a mini tutorial, they are a lot lighter.

Note: GIF – only uses 256 colors. It’s the best choice for animated images. It only uses lossless compression.

Conclusion

There you have it, our top 5 steps that you can use right away to optimize your Wix website speed in under 20 minutes. Here is a quick recap: Make sure you check if you meet the supported operating system & supported browser that Wix requires for optimal speed. Use Wix speed test to get more accurate result.

Key takeaways

1. Compress high quality images
2. Reduce animations
3. Remove external applications including third party apps or custom codes
4. Use at most 2 fonts for your website
5. Try not to use too many media on your website.

We hope that we could help to improve your Wix web design in those 5 steps. We provide SEO audit services, and we can guarantee to bring you site speed from F to A with our analytical approach. Contact us to book today!