When you’re on the Internet, you can’t help but be impatient. With research showing that 47% of consumers expect a website to load within 2 seconds or less, and about 40% would leave if it takes more than 3 seconds, you could easily lose out a lot if you have a slow loading site.
In fact, you might even be losing out before someone reaches your site.
Why? Because Google takes speed (as part of its algorithm) seriously and if you’re a website that doesn’t load fast enough, you can bet that you’ll end up lower on their search results.
But here’s the thing, it doesn’t take a lot to improve your website speed. In fact, if you just follow some of the tips that we’ve listed below, you can easily improve your website speed and more importantly, improve your conversion rates.
Optimize Your Images
Images are one of the biggest culprits for slowing down a website. Odds are you’ll find that by optimizing your images, you will improve the speed of your website dramatically.
But what do we mean by “optimizing”?
Well, we know it’s important for a website to have high-quality images if they want to capture the audience’s attention, HOWEVER, the problem with that is huge image files tends to eat up a lot of bandwidth. That’s a huge waste of bandwidth, especially if you’re scaling your images appropriately.
The mistake that people often do is to upload an image that’s 1000 x 1000 pixels when it only displays at 100 x 100 pixels on your website. Even if the image appears small on the page, the website will still load up the entire image, which takes up bandwidth and impacts load times.
So, before you upload an image to your website, make sure that you’ve reduced the size or scale it appropriately using tools such as Image Optimizer or Smush.
Go For Simple Website Designs
When it comes to web design and themes, the best approach is to always keep it simple. Sure, you might be tempted to load up your website with as many fancy designs or features, but that will just slow your website down.
By reducing the number of elements on your website, you reduce the number of HTTP requests that your website needs to load it up. When a website is loaded, an HTTP request is made for each element of your website, which includes JavaScript, CSS, and image files. The more elements you, the more time it takes to load up.
Keep your website design simple and that will definitely improve your website’s speed significantly. Plus, when you simplify your web design, you have the added benefit of improving your site’s UX for your users.
Use Caching Tools
For repeat visitors, using and enabling caching tools can greatly reduce the load times of your website when they revisit.
How caching works is that the visitors will keep some of the elements of your website (i.e. images, files, data, etc.) on their hard drive in a temporary storage or cache. That way, when they visit your site, the browser can just load up the page using the stored data.
This eliminates the need to re-download all of your website data again and also skips the process of sending HTTP requests to your servers again. Some of the caching tools that you can check out are W3 Total, Hyper Cache, and WP-Rocket.
Switch to a New Host
When you’ve done all you can to optimize your images, use simpler web design, and tried caching tools and your website is still slow, then maybe it’s time to take a look at your web host provider.
If your website is still slow even after you’ve made improvements, then there’s a possibility that the servers at your host provider are having issues. Contact your provider to check if they are experiencing any server issues or whether you’ve surpassed their server limits.
Most of the time, it might be due to your website needing more bandwidth and server resources if it’s attracting more traffic and users. When this happens, it’s probably time to consider upgrading your web host.
Wrap Up
So there you have it, 4 tips that you can use to speed up your website. Of course, there are many more ways that you can do to improve your website speed but the ones listed above are some of the easiest to perform if you’re not technically adept.
Are there any other website speed tips that we should know about? Let us know in the comments!
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