5 Ways To Speed Up Your Website
If you think that speeding up your website isn’t important, you might want to think again.
A simple one-second page load delay can lead to:
- 10% fewer page views
- 13% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 9% loss in conversions
Just these statistics show having a fast site is relevant and important and not just for improving SEO.
Here are 10 ways to help speed up your website:
1. Enable browser caching
When you visit a website, the elements of that page are stored on your hard drive in a cache or temporary storage. This means that the next time you pay a visit to the site, your browser can load the page without sending additional HTTP requests to the server.
Tenny Theurer, formerly of Yahoo says this;
„The first time someone comes to your website, they have to download the HTML document, stylesheets, Javascript files and images before being able to use your page. That may be as many as 30 components and 2.4 seconds. “
Once the page loads and the components have been stored in the user’s cache, only a few components need to be downloaded for subsequent visits.
According to Theurer, 40–60& of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache, so your page must be fast for first-time visitors. The way your caching is set up depends on whether you run your site with WordPress or HTML.
2. Reduce image sizes
This is the most talked-about way of improving site speed. Images play a major role in your site speed. More often than not, they are very large files meaning they can greatly impact page load times. However, removing images all together is never an option. So, what now?
Reducing their size can likely have a huge impact on page loading times. According to a study, resizing 24MB images down to 250KB resulted in a 73% reduction in loading times.
This can be achieved by simply cropping images to the correct size. Using the width parameter to make images appear smaller on your site is a great way to do it.
Next, you can compress your image files with all kinds of different tools. If you are using Wordpress, WP Smush is a good option
3. Use external hosting platforms
This is particularly valuable for videos. Let’s say you added a video tutorial to your site. Simply uploading it onto your site would greatly impact video loading times. Instead, you can host your video on a third-party service like Youtube or Vimeo and then proceed to embed the video on your site. Not only are you saving space by doing this, but you are also greatly improving your loading times. The only thing you need to do is choose which third-party service you would like to use.
As is well known, YouTube is the king of video streaming, but other options are available. It is completely up to you!
4. Prioritize above the fold content.
You can improve user experience by having above the fold sections load faster. Another name for this is ‘lazy loading’ and it is extremely helpful for pages that contain large amounts of content below the fold.
For example, let’s say you write a blog and that blog includes 13 photos. Usually, a user’s browsers would need to download all those images before being able to display anything else on the page. With lazy loading, it can load content within view first and later on downloading the photos. This allows the user to access the page faster while loading the images as they come into view.
Some of the plugins for lazy loading include Lazy Load, BJ Lazy Load, WP Rocket, and others.
5. Monitor your speed over time
While you are busy working on improving your site speed, it is not a bad idea to monitor changes over time. This is just as important after you achieved your page load goal as it was when you first started.
Monitoring your load times regularly helps you catch any issues early on, and helps improve the overall shape of your site.
How can you check your website speed?
Many tools allow you to do a website speed test. Pingdom’s Website Speed Test is one of them. By entering your URL and then selecting where you want to test your site from it allows you to check your site speed. It gives you a summary of your page’s load times and performances, including your page size and many other benefits.
This information can help you gain insight into your site speed’s health, and tracking it over time is the simplest way to monitor any improvements or decreases in performance.
Conclusion
Getting your page load times right can be challenging but once it’s done right it can greatly improve your user experience and increase conversions. Make sure to spend time looking through your site’s speed and keep track of any issues that may pop up.
