Is your website driving your potential customers away just because of the slow loading speed? If yes, then this article is just for you. Read and fix your problem to the soonest…
Of course, it is frustrating when someone clicks on your site and it takes more than 3 seconds to load the page.
The faster the loading speed is, the more the traffic will come and stick on your site for longer which can help in boosting your website conversion rate. And, the slower the loading speed is, the lower the conversion rate will be and boost the exit rate of your potential client.
To let your customers visit your website and stay for longer, here are a few benefits of faster website, that I have noticed so far;
- You will get maximum website visitors or viewers who are going to visit your website regularly
- It will boost up sales and profits of your products and services on your site
- Your site will get highlighted in optimal visibility and accessibility
What I believe is that the speed of a website is a critical factor to achieve higher SEO rankings and conversion rates, longer visitor duration on site, lower bounce rates, better overall user experience, and engagement.
Although, there are many free tools available, where you can test the speed of your website, but below mentioned are the tools that I used to check my clients’ website speed;
- Google developers tool– This scrutinizes the content of a web page, then generates proposals to make that page load faster.
- GTmetrix– It gives you an understanding on how well your site loads and give noteworthy suggestions on how to optimize it.
- Pingdom– Check your site’s accessibility and performance to know when your site is down.
You can also read: 10 Amazing Tips to Optimize Your Landing Page for Mobile
Now that we have discussed Li’l about tools, let’s dive into ways to increase your website’s loading speed.
#1 Image Optimization
Image optimization is a must because images increase the size of the page. It’s very simple that the larger the image is, the more time it will take to load. Compacting the size of the image files can decrease the loading speed. The JPEG format is the best option. Edit or crop your images and then use them as thumbnails. Despite the fact that this procedure can take a lot of time, but these steps will boost up the loading speed of your website tremendously.
You can also read: Top 5 Easy to Use Free Image Editing Tools
#2 Minimize HTTP Requests
Minimizing HTTP Requests can have a sizable effect on your website and you will quickly see the speed improvement. This can make sure that visitors can visit the site effortlessly and search engine crawlers can access pages to rank them for search results. By minimizing HTTP requests, you are decreasing the quantity of things that are to be loaded on every page.
#3 Enable Gzip compression
True that large pages are somewhat of 100kb or more than that. This results in slow loading speeds as they are bulky. So, the best solution is to compress them in order to speed up the loading time. Gzip is the perfect tool that compresses your website files into zip files, which automatically helps in reducing the size of your pages up to 70% and increases the speed of a site.
You can also read: Top SEO Trends That Will Dominate This Year- 2017
#4 Enable Browser Cache
Every time a visitor visit your website, he gets annoyed by downloading the same thing while loading a page. Do you want to make your visitors annoying? If no, then enable cache on your browser. Actually, what happens that when you visit any site, the components on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache.
And, next time when you visit the site, your browser starts loading the page without sending another HTTP request to the server, and show you the same results with faster speed. It is recommendable to enable your websites browser cache.
#5 Critical Path and Render Blocking Resources (CSS + JS)
While checking the speed of your website’s pages, find out what may be blocking the DOM, and causing a delay in your page loading speed. This is also known as render blocking assets, for example, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
To prevent your CSS;
- Call your CSS files properly
- Reduce the amount of CSS files in the critical path
- Use less CSS overall
And, to prevent your Javascript;
- Move your scripts in the end of the page just before your </body> tag.
- Use the async or defer directive to ignore render blocking.
- Connect your JS files into one document with HTTP/2
- Minify your Javascript by removing extra spaces, characters, and so on
- Inline your JS if it is less
#6 Remove Extra Plugins that you use on your site
An excessive plugins can slow your site, make security issues, and frequently cause crashes and other technical troubles. Thus, try specifically disabling plugins that will damage your site speed. At least in a month, review plugins on your website and delete those which are not in use.
#7 Minimize Redirects To Your Website
Redirects, also known as performance killers, create extra HTTP requests and increase the loading time of your website. So, you must avoid them. Redirects will create extra round trip times (RTT) and thus, the time needed to load the HTML file gets double before the browser begins to load other resources.
Do you want to create a quick-to-respond site? If yes, then Google has recommended the two ways;
- Use an HTTP redirect to send users with mobile user agents directly to the mobile equivalent URL without any intermediate redirects
- Include the<link rel=”alternate”> markup in your desktop pages to make out the mobile equivalent URL so that Googlebot can find your mobile pages.
#8 Minify JavaScript and CSS files
If your site is using a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, there’s a high plausibility that your site is advising your visitor’s browser to treat these files separately and this will have a long-lasting negative impact on the loading speed of your website. Therefore, by minifying JavaScript and CSS files by expelling the unnecessary characters from your HTML, Javascript, and CSS that are not required to load, for example, whitespace characters, new line characters, comments, and block delimiters. This enhances your site’s speed as it decreases the amount of code that has to be requested from the server.
You can also read: Top 10 Digital Marketing Experts and Keynote Speakers to Follow in 2017
Conclusion
True that the speed of the website matters a lot! So, if you have your own website or you take care of your clients’ website, make sure you give a proper care and attention to its speed. This is an important way to let web clients get the best and helpful experience.
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