5 Ways To Improve Website Speed

Your website is the gateway to your business so you want to make that gateway as inviting and accessible as possible.

12:03 28 December 2020

There are many ways of doing that, such as creating an attractive UX (User Experience) and an intuitive UI (User Interface). However, one important factor should not be overlooked and that is the loading speed of the website.

 

Studies have shown that a waiting time of just three seconds is enough to turn people off of a website. So if you want your website to make a great first impression, then you need to make its pages load as fast as possible. That goes for the mobile version of your website as well since smartphones are a popular method of browsing the web. There are some things that you can do to speed up your website, but you should use the services of an SEO agency if you want your website’s pages to load practically instantaneously.

 

Reduce the File Size of Your Pictures

 

Many people might not realize that the pictures on their website might be responsible for slowing the site down. People are advised to use high-quality, high-resolution images on their website, and while that is good advice, the large file sizes of those images could end up slowing the website down because they can take a while to load. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem because there are many programs that allow you to resize image files without affecting the quality of the image.

 

Windows and Mac both feature photo editing software that allows file resizing, advanced picture editors like Photoshop also allow you to resize images. There are also many free programs on the internet that have that function. So there is no reason to have oversized image files slowing your website down.

 

Remove Unnecessary Plugins

 

Plugins are software add-ons to computer programs that provide them with extra functionality. Most of them are very useful because they give you more ways to customize your website and make it more user-friendly. However, too many plugins, as well as poor quality plugins, can compromise a website’s speed. So you should conduct an inventory of your plugins to find the unnecessary ones that are slowing down your website.

 

Enable Browser Caching

 

While you should get rid of some plugins, one that you should keep is the one that enables browser caching. This allows visitors to store downloadable files from your site on their web browser so that they do not have to redownload those files every time they visit your website. This drastically reduces load speeds and makes your website far more convenient. There are many plugins like WP Rocket that enable browser caching, so do some research and find out which one is right for your site.

 

Choose the Right Web Host

 

A good web host will have a solid server architecture that receives regular updates to make sure that all of the web sites it hosts will always run as fast as possible. There are dozens of web hosting companies available so you should do the research to find one that has a stable architecture at a reasonable price. If you decide to choose the cheapest option, then you could end up with a slow loading website that repels potential visitors.

 

Use a CDN

 

CDN stands for content delivery network and it is basically a set of servers distributed across a huge area. This is useful because it means that web content travels more quickly to users that are not located in the same area as the business. So if your company is based in America, but you have customers from China, then normally your site would load more slowly for people in China than those in America because the content has to travel a longer distance. With a CDN, that is not a problem because the content will be transitioned to servers that are closer to the country of the person who is accessing your website.

 

Conclusion

 

A slow website is bad for business so make sure that yours is always as fast as possible. You should conduct regular speed tests using any of the various internet tools available to measure website load speeds. If yours is too slow, then you should fix that problem quickly, either by yourself if you can, or preferably with the help of an SEO agency.