The most important thing for the success of your online presence is the website speed. If your site is slow, potential leads and current customers aren’t going to sit around and wait for it to load.
Since 2010, Google has been accounting for a site speed in its algorithm. Thus, A slow site is going to negatively affect your Google rankings. That means fewer leads with reduced organic search traffic.
Considering to avoid this, here are a few tips you can use to improve the speed of your site –
- Identify Speed Issues
The first thing to do is to know how fast is your website and what are the issues causing the website to load slowly. While there are a few tools to figure this out, we prefer to simply use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Put in your website URL and in a few seconds, you will receive an evaluation for the mobile and desktop versions of your website that include helpful suggestions.
Through this PageSpeed Insights, you exactly know what are the issues on your website
that are causing to load it at slow speed and how you can improve it. Once you know what steps to take, you can get into action and work on the issues.
- Optimize / Tweak images
While optimizing images, you need to consider three things: size, format and the src attribute.
(i) Image size: Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important that you keep your images as small as possible. For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser will load ten times faster. Avoid using huge images and then scaling them down with CSS, as in this case the browser still loads them at the full image size. Scaling images before you upload them to your site is the right choice always.(ii) Image format: The images need to be in the right format and compressed for the web. Try to save an image in JPEG format. You can use a CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+S shortcut to save an optimized image in Adobe Photoshop. PNGs are better for graphics, whereas JPEG is considered to be better for photographs. To ensure your images load quickly, consider using WP Smush plugin on your WordPress website. (iii) The src attribute: Once you have got the image size and format right, make sure the code is right too. Make sure that the image src codes are not empty.In HTML, the code for an image includes this:<img src=””>
When there’s no source in the quotation marks, the browser makes a request to the directory of the page or to the actual page itself. This can add unnecessary traffic to your servers and even corrupt user data.
- Eliminate unnecessary plugins and addons
Many businesses today are using the site builders. This saves time and money and allows them to have a site up and running in minutes. However, this also leads to performance issues. On sites that use free themes, the coding is not of professional standards, and it could be slowing you down due to unnecessary scripts and add-ons.Go through your site and delete any plugins and add-ons that are not necessary. Though it costs a lot to hire a Web developer, it’s better to go for a professional developer than losing customers because of a page that’s lacking in terms of design, performance, and speed.
- Minify JavaScript, CSS and HTML Code
The Web server and browser will read only the essentials in the code. The extra code written by developers needs to be removed from your scripts in order to reduce the size and improve loading speed. In short, you need to optimize your code and this will help you increase your page speed drastically. If you don’t have a developer on hand, you can use a minifying service on your Web host or hire an independent company to take care of it.By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. You can check how to minify resources.
- Replace your YouTube code
If you use YouTube videos on your site – well, this is another reason why your site loads slowly! It is so because the page has to download CSS, images, and JavaScript resources in order to load the videos. The files download to your site even if the visitor doesn’t click on the videos.
- Forget the Jazzy Home Page
You want a jazzy home page and so you use Flash or a few different widgets on your homepage! Well, you should avoid this as it causes the page to load slowly. Your home page is most likely where visitors are going to land first when they access your site. Keep it as simple as possible, and don’t go overboard with text, images, and plugins.
- Use Compression (gzip)
You will want to ask your web host if they use GZIP compression and deflation on their servers. These are two techniques that are significantly useful for speeding up a site, reducing file size by as much as 70% without degrading the quality of the images, video or the site at all. You can see if your site is using Gzip and how much the page has been compressed by using GID Zip Test.
- Use browser caching
Browsers cache a lot of information (stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more) so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page. How long you store the data depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings. In many cases, unless your site design changes frequently, a year is a reasonable time period. Plugins like WP Super Cache can take a serious bite out of page load times.
- Use CDN
Content distribution networks (CDNs), also called content delivery networks, are networks of servers that are used to distribute the load of delivering content. If your site is extremely popular but you’re still having trouble getting your page load down to size, consider a (CDN). CDN work by serving pages depending on where the user is located, i.e, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.
- Minimize HTTP requests
Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, stylesheets, and images.
- Reduce 301 Redirects
If you have changed your site structure and don’t want to lose any of that search engine juice, a 301 redirect is the preferred way. But lots of 301 redirects piled together just confuse the browser and slow it down as it wades through the old destinations to get to the new one. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.
- Reduce Server Response Time
You should target a server response time of less than 200ms (milliseconds). And if you follow the tips in this article, you are well on your way to achieving this. If you want to learn more about performance best-practice and automate the process, check out Google’s PageSpeed Tools.
If you use all these tricks, your page will surely load quickly. A faster website tends to boost customer confidence and trust in your site, thus, a few seconds can make all the difference! You will be able to get more customers and keep your current customers happy, thus increasing the conversions.
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed and help improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
Have you come up with a unique way to speed up your website? Share your tips below.