Having a fast loading website is essential to providing a good user experience. It's also essential for SEO performance, and ranking high in search engines. Slow loading websites drive users away, often never to return. As Tom Cruise famously says, "We have a need for speed".
This data from Google shows us exactly the hazards of a slow loading website. Pages that load in under three seconds are optimal. Pages that take just 2 seconds longer to load see a 3X increase in the probability of bouncing.
The HubSpot CMS is built for speed.
It is one of the advanced content management systems available today. Speed is the #1 reason why we recommend HubSpot over Wordpress.
There are a thousand ways that HubSpot and the HubSpot CMS make websites faster, but in this post, I want to highlight the ways that HubSpot CMS works behind the scenes (in invisible ways) to optimize and speed up your website. Optimization while you sleep!
HubSpot CMS Optimizes Your Website
People love residual income because they literally can make money while they sleep. The HubSpot CMS is a bit like that because it literally is optimizing your website without any further effort on your part.
SSL Included
Google started flagging pages without SSL back in 2017. It labels these websites as "not secure" and encourages users not to load the page.
Google Chrome has over 60% of the browser market, so this warning hits a large majority of web traffic. HubSpot includes SSL standard for all websites and landing pages.
With SSL included, HubSpot guarantees the Chrome warning won't be seen by any visitors to your site.
JavaScript Minification
Websites are run on code. This code is a lot easier for developers to read when they insert line breaks, spaces and comments. For the browser, this extra takes additional time to read and can slow down your website.
Smaller JavaScript files result in a faster, smoother user experience.
Minification, also known as minimization, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from JavaScript source code without altering its functionality.
Cloudflare, the popular web application, security and performance company gives us this example.
Before minification, there is eight lines of code.
After minification: one line of code.
HubSpot will automatically remove any unnecessary spaces, line breaks and comments from your design manager JavaScript files to ensure they are delivered as quickly as possible.
Note that JavaScript files uploaded to File Manager are not automatically minified. You'll need to do this before you upload.
CSS Combining
HubSpot automatically minifies CSS, and combines all of the CSS files on a page into one CSS file. This combining results in fewer HTTP requests and the fastest delivery of CSS.
Browser and Server Caching
Each new visitor to your website comes a browser that is processing a complex string of page requests. These requests hit various servers and routes the traffic to serve visitors the files.
HubSpot automatically caches pages on the server and browser to ensure the fastest page load times. Change your page? No problem, HubSpot expires the cache for that page and reserves it.
Server caching particularly works well for mobile users where data speeds can be less than optimal.
Text Compression
Text-based files like HTML, CSS, and JS are all compressed before they are sent to the browser. Compression reduces file sizes by 10x.
Image Compression/Optimization
Images uploaded to HubSpots file manger are automatically optimized. All images are recompressed to be visually lossless.
As the HubSpot CMS renders a page, HubSpot automatically resizes images.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
AMP pages are a specific mobile only format that loads content nearly instantaneously. AMP can be enabled on HubSpot blogs.
Connect With a HubSpot Partner
HubSpot CMS Hub goes all in on website performance. It works behind the scenes to speed up your entire site. But there is a lot you can do on the front end to improve your website's performance. The Diamond Group is a HubSpot agency partner. We've gone all-in on building websites on the HubSpot CMS platform because it's faster, safer, and more secure.
