Running and maintaining a successful business is no easy feat. Between anticipating customer needs, managing marketing campaigns, creating content and trying to reconcile the books—it can be overwhelming! Unfortunately, if your website visitors experience slow loading speeds it can reflect poorly on your brand image. In addition, drive away potential customers. Fortunately, there are some simple steps that you can take to help ensure that faster loading speeds remain consistent for all of your website visitors. In this blog post we will discuss 9 top tips for increasing your website’s loading speeds. As a result, better serving both new and existing customers.
Why website speed is important and how it affects user experience
Website speed is an important factor to consider when optimizing website performance. It is an essential optimization factor that should not be overlooked. Therefore, every site owner wants to achieve speed quickly as it has a direct impact on the overall user experience. Additionally, it affects SEO search engine optimization and rankings. Highly renowned search engines such as Google prioritize website speed when it comes to their core vitals. This means website owners should be extra diligent in providing their users with quick loading times. Otherwise, their site’s ranking will suffer and the user experience will become compromised.
With website page speed being a fundamental element of providing this kind of service, site owners must work towards improving loading times to create the optimum user experience. As a result, this can improve organic rankings on popular search engines due to their algorithm. which tends to prioritize quicker web speeds over slower ones. Therefore, increasing conversions and new potential customers.
9 Important Tips for Increasing Your Website’s Speed
1. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be a powerful way to improve the speed of your website. A CDN optimizes website delivery by storing duplicates of site content (images, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc.) on servers located around the world. In addition, it views the geographic location of each user. Therefore, delivering content from the server closest to them as soon as they request it. This effectively decreases page load times and website latency. As a result, allowing users to access site content quicker than ever before.
Without a CDN in place, website content can take much longer to load since it has to travel further distances as opposed to being sent from a closer location. Additionally, CDNs can help to improve website security and reduce traffic congestion on the server. In short, utilizing a CDN can greatly improve website speed and increase its performance.
2. Optimize Your Images
Optimizing website images is a necessary step to ensure your website runs smoothly and quickly. Reducing the size of images with minimal effect on quality will dramatically improve website speed. As a result, creating an easier experience for website visitors. Large images will drastically increase website loading times. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that these are regularly optimized.
For example, it’s best to keep website images no larger than 1000px by 1000px, as every pixel can increase loading time. To reduce file sizes without compromising image quality you can use a website like TinyPng. This tool compresses your files using its compress algorithm and reduces their size without impacting resolution or clarity. As a result, improving your website speed dramatically. You don’t want poor website performance to turn users off from engaging with your site. Optimizing images is a simple process that will provide smooth user experience leading to better engagement and more conversions.
3. Minimize HTTP Requests
One of the best ways to increase website speed and minimize unnecessary HTTP requests. Every time a user visits your website, their browser sends an HTTP request to your server in order to retrieve the files necessary to display your site. Therefore, the more files required, the more HTTP requests will be made. And. the longer it takes your website to load. Cutting down load times can be achieved through ‘bundling’ multiple files into one file where possible. Furthermore, ‘unbundling’ unnecessarily large files, or using the most efficient file format for each particular task.
One example of how this can be achieved is using a technique known as CSS Sprites. CSS Sprites involves combining multiple images into one file, where each image represents a single object, such as an icon or button. By using this method, website developers can reduce the total number of HTTP requests to their server by creating one single file instead of several separate ones. Loading times are dramatically reduced as your visitors won’t have to wait for each image on a page to load one-by-one in order for them to view content correctly.
4. Use Caching Techniques
Caching involves storing frequently accessed website data in memory. Therefore, it can be accessed quickly without having to constantly make HTTP requests back to the server. There are various caching methods you can use. This includes:
Page and browser cache
Dynamic HTML generation
Database queries
Web services
Web services are a modern technique for website speed optimization, dependent upon the types of services being used. It can be leveraged to break huge website pages or apps into smaller components. Web services generally offer website speed and performance benefits by deploying a ‘lazily loading’ approach. This basically means site content is loaded only when requested by the user. Therefore, the initial request should be minimal so that it appears to load faster.
Examples of web services used would be caching techniques such as Memcached and Redis. In addition, CDN services like Amazon CloudFront or Akamai. This allows users to receive updates from multiple sources at once through short calls combined in a single thread rather than accessing various resources one at a time consuming more bandwidth. Popular examples for this technique include PayPal’s APIs for payment processing and Amazon’s Simple Queue Service for queues management requests.
5. Minify your code bloat
Minifying code is an important step in increasing website speed. The process involves removing all unnecessary characters from website code. For example, whitespace, comments, and block delimiters. This helps reduce the file size of website resources. Therefore, significantly improving website performance. The minification process occurs after a website’s source code is written, such as HTML and CSS. Through the process of minifying code, site developers can efficiently clean up the source code by removing superfluous characters from scripts. In addition, stylesheets that do not affect how these resources are processed by a web browser.
6. Use a fast webhost
Using a fast webhost is an effective way to increase website speed. Therefore, leading to improved website performance. A web host is a service or platform that gives website owners access to the technologies they need to put their website online and store it. By utilizing powerful servers, a site hosted by a faster webhost will take less time to download and render in the browser. As a result, improving user experience significantly.
Examples of some of the best webhosting companies are Flywheel, WP Engine, and Bluehost. Managed hosting provides website owners with more managed features than shared hosting. For example, Flywheel and WP Engine offer resources like website restores, no downtime transfers, faster page loading times from caching systems, advanced security measures like malware detection & blocking, fewer malicious attacks, website malpractice scans & more. On the other hand, shared hosting providers like Bluehost is typically better for when your website isn’t receiving a lot of traffic and/or you’re just starting out. With shared hosting your website shares space on a physical server making it more cost effective but less secure in terms of malicious activity targets as well as shared uptime & website speed benefits since all sites are hosted on one server together.
7. Enable Compression
Compression works by taking media files that are larger than necessary and compressing them into a smaller version suitable for web use. For example, image files such as JPG, PNG, and SVG all require compression before being uploaded to a website. There are many tools available for website developers to enable compression. For instance, open-source solutions such as G ZIP being a popular choice. G ZIP compresses website assets which reduces their download time. Therefore, resulting in faster website speed overall. Enabling compression on your website is therefore essential in order to ensure optimal performance.
8. Avoid redirects
Redirects occur when a website visitor requests a URL that doesn’t exist and the site redirects them to another page that does. Not only do redirects slow load times, they can also be difficult to debug and detect. To keep site speed up, website creators should take steps to avoid these issues. For instance, using browser caching and compressing images.
An example of a redirect could be when a website visitor types in www.example.com. However, the site actually loads from www.example.net. Therefore, requiring the visitor’s browser to go through two addresses before loading the page completely. Fortunately, there are several plugins that can help you avoid redirects on your site. For example, Redirection, Swift Performance Lite and 307 – Temporary Redirects & Completion Search Engine Optimization Settings.
9. Leverage Browser Caching
Leveraging browser caching is a great way to increase website speed without making drastic changes to website structure or code. The browser itself stores information so that the website does not need to reload information on future visits. It works by cached website assets (such as images, JavaScript files, and CSS files) stored in the user’s browser. Therefore, they do not need to be downloaded each time the website is revisited. An example of how this works is when a website contains an image. When it is first loaded, the image file stays cached in its memory until the cache expires. Therefore, it does not need to be downloaded again every time the page is visited.
In Summary
