Know The Ways Of Speeding Up Your Website

If you are under the impression that the speed of a website is not essential, think again. You perhaps not yet realized that a slow website leads to fewer page views, a decrease in customer satisfaction, and hence a loss in conversions. And these do not sound good for any business. The speed of a website can have a significant impact on engaging visitors and making sales.

Why is Page Speed Important?

The speed of a website is crucial for businesses. But when it comes to speed, many websites function poorly, impacting negatively on the revenue.

Website speed influences in:

• How long visitors stay on the website
• The number of visitors converting into customers
• SEO ranking

In What Ways Website-Speed Optimizes Conversions?

Having a slow website is a good way of killing conversions. So, you need to avoid that as 47% of consumers expect a website to load within two seconds, and if the website takes three or more seconds to load, 40% of visitors will abandon the page. Worst still, if the loading speed is more than three seconds, you will lose almost half of your visitors even before they arrive on the website. It is needless to describe how it drives off your potential customers and hence your business.

Even if a few of the visitors browse your slow website, they might not return in the future. In a survey, 79% of the participants said that they would not return to a website with reduced speed. In that survey, 52% of the shoppers said that website speed is crucial for the loyalty for their website. The substance of the study was that even a one-second delay in website loading could decrease customer satisfaction by about 16%.

So, you need to put in efforts to speed up your website to improve the conversion rate.

How Loading Speed Influences Website Visibility?

Since, search engines, such as Google, takes into account the speed of the website for ranking websites, the load time is a decisive factor in deciding how easily consumers can find your website.

As mobile searches have grown significantly, search engines now rank all search results based on the mobile version of the pages. Consequently, mobile user experience plays a significant role in search rankings.

To improve the search engine rankings and maintain its visibility, you need to work on reducing the loading time for your website.

How Can You Speed Up Your Website?

You need not worry if your website is slow as there are many ways to speed up your website. Here are some of the effective ways:

Reduce HTTP Calls

The majority of the loading time, up to 80%, is spent on downloading the various page elements, like images, stylesheets, and scripts. 

During the page loading process, each of the elements is called upon by an HTTP request. So more the number of such on-page components, the longer is the page-loading time.

You need to reduce the number of on-page components so that your website loads faster

Optimize Media Files

With the availability of mobile phones with powerful cameras and content management systems, uploading images to websites has become easier than ever. But the downside is that large images can slow down your website as they take a longer time to load. You need to optimize the media files to speed up your website. Convert photographic images into the JPG format, and other images into GIF or PNG formats. And for video images, convert them into the MP4 format, which is small in size.

Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content

You can apply a trick to improve the user experience. Use only one CSS stylesheet and no inline CSS so that you can have the above the fold (top of the page) section load faster, while the rest of the page will take some seconds to load.

This method is known as the lazy loading, and it is applicable for pages with many contents below the fold.

It is particularly helpful for pages with lots of content below the fold. It can load the content within the view firstly and subsequently load the following content.

Enable Browser Caching

Enabling browser caching is a good way of improving website speed. When you enable the browser caching, the elements of your webpage is stored in the visitors’ browser. As such, when they visit your website for the next time, their browser will load the page without the need for sending another HTTP request.

Your website will speed up as the elements stored in the user’s cache will be loaded, and only a few of the elements will be downloaded.

Choose the Right Hosting Option

The hosting option you choose has a lot to do to increase the speed of your website. Typically, you have four choices to host your website:

Shared Hosting allows you to shares resources, like CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites hosted on the same server. While it is okay with low traffic websites, problems arise when the traffic gets high.

VPS Hosting allows you to have your dedicated portions of the server resources while sharing the server with other sites. It is a better option as compared to Shared Hosting.

Fully Managed VPS Hosting is a good option. It is cost-effective and highly secure.

Dedicated Hosting allows you to own a server and have complete control over your hosting. It is the best option as websites load faster.

Use a CDN

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a good way of speeding up your website. A CDN caches your website to a global network of servers. When a browser requests files from your website, the request is served through the closest server, helping your website to load quickly.

Optimize CSS

CSS is the styling requirement for your website. And there are two methods of styling your website through CSS: external and inline. Avoid the inline method, and put the CSS codes in an external file. It helps in decreasing the website load time as it reduces the code and duplications.

Lessen Plugins

Despite plugins have a lot to offer, yet having too many of them can lead to some negative issues. They can create security issues, slow down your website and even cause crashes. So, lessen the number of plugins and retain only the indispensable ones.

Conclusion

The speed of your website is a crucial factor in deciding the success of your business. It bears the potential to make or break your business so if your website is getting slow, direct efforts to speed it up.