It is very important for the website to load quickly and have good speed in terms of site loading and performance because it is a well-known fact that visitors don’t wait for your website to load because there are several options available on the search engine results page and once your website fails to load, the visitors move to the next option.
It is evident that website speed is incredibly important when it comes to visitor engagement and here are some facts that demonstrate just how important website speed is in terms of attracting visitors to a website.
This happens when a few seconds pass before the page loads:
● Page views get decreased by 13%
● Customer satisfaction drops by 15%
● Conversion loss of around 9%
When your site takes a few extra seconds to load, you will be less able to engage and convert your visitors. This means that having a fast site is essential — not just for ranking well with Google, but also for maintaining your high profitability levels.
Here are some tips that you can use to speed up your website.
(1) Conduct a Survey of the Website
To begin the process of speeding up your website, you need to conduct a thorough survey, where you can use various online tools that can help in identifying the issues of your website so that you could actually implement the changes accordingly.
There are many online tools and software that can be accessed to check the overall health of a website and these tools and software are really useful when they show certain results regarding page speed and other website-related factors, which can be used to make effective decisions for the website to ensure that it is fast and user-friendly.
The speed of the website is greatly affected by the elements on the page such as the videos, images, and text, so the speed and the page loading keep on changing, meaning that its speed is increasing or decreasing with every update.
Some of the most popular tools in order to check the performance of the website are.
● GTmetrix
● solarwinds pingdom
The above-mentioned tools are of great help to website owners and are recommended for them to use since they are tried and tested options and provide very meaningful results.
(2) Optimization of the Website Is Very Necessary
Enhancing the speed of the website through optimization is the key to improving its performance in a positive way.
Organizing your content in a readable manner can have a significant effect on website speed and readability. This aspect is especially important for long blogs or websites.
Here are some tips for optimizing your website.
● Structure your content in such a way that it is more readable and it should be divided into segments so that the relevant information is visible to the user and the relevant part of the page is only loaded by the site, thus saving time during the loading process.
● When it comes to optimizing a website, organizing pages in an effective manner is one of the most important things because every single page should not be very heavy in terms of load time, so it’s better to split work into different parts.
(3) Content Compression Should Be a Priority
Content compression is a way of making the same amount of content fit into a website in such a way that it doesn’t take as much space within the website or its size is reduced so that the website loads relatively quickly.
Compressing website files saves bandwidth and decreases the loading time of the site. The gzip format is used to compress, and the browsers can unzip and display the compressed files.
Some of the merits of content compression are
● Saves time – which simply means the loading time of the website
● More content can be displayed in the same amount of bandwidth
(4) Regular Cleanup Is Vital
The website should be maintained regularly in order to make it load faster because a website can accumulate a large amount of junk over a period of time, and then it is very important to throw out all of that junk and free up some valuable space from the website.
In order to maintain the blazing fast speed of the website, your website cleanup must include everything from unoptimized codes, poorly written articles, scarp images, videos, and articles that are not pertinent to the website.
The website cleanup should include everything so that the website may free up more space for itself to facilitate more speed.
Why is the regular cleanup of the website essential?
● Makes the website lighter to load
● Makes the website far more responsive
● Makes appeal of web pages fresh and attractive
(5) Optimization of the Code Can’t Be Ignored
Websites are generally built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript protocols, so it is imperative for companies hiring developers to make sure that they are able to build and maintain a fast, stable website.
A website’s speed is actually determined by the code it contains, so you need to write an excellent set of code upfront so that optimization is possible at the end of the development process.
What can we do in order to improve from the coding-end?
1. HTML – When it comes to HTML, we can actually do numerous things to shorten the HTML code or to make the HTML code more readable to the other developers. Some of the most common practices are using Semantic HTML and HTML 5 to write the HTML code.
2. CSS – CSS is the most commonly used language for handling the design part of the site, and therefore CSS is not actually considered a programming language but rather a designing language. The CSS does contain some useful elements, however, that can serve as a means to reduce the size of the code and make the website look even better.
3. JAVASCRIPT – Even though JavaScript is not required for every website to use because there are multiple alternatives out there, it still remains the most popular among all the scripting languages, so there are numerous ways to optimize JavaScript code such as using the “asynchronous” approach of scripting, lazy loading, and many more methods.
Business owners and website owners are actually recommended to use the above methods for the coding so that the size of the code can be reduced effectively and the code of the website can be excellent.
(6) Invest In a Good Hosting
In order for your website to run efficiently, you need to get unmetered storage and unlimited bandwidth, so both of these factors can contribute effectively to the smooth running of the website.
● Unmetered Storage – The websites require unlimited storage so that there is never a shortage of space and the owners can post the maximum amount of content on their site without having to worry about running out of storage.
● Unlimited Bandwidth – Having discussed before that the bandwidth of the website is one of the most influential aspects that affect the overall speed and loading time of the website, it is generally recommended for website owners to choose a plan that includes unlimited bandwidth.
What else a good hosting offers?
● Mobile Responsive Themes
● AI-powered Templates
● Automatic Site Optimization
● Automatic daily malware scan
● Speed Boosting CDN
(7) Do Consider a Content Delivery Network
Content delivery networks, or CDNs, are tools that significantly improve website performance and reduce server load. CDNs distribute files across a network of servers rather than just one.
When someone visits your website, the data loads from the server location closest to them, reducing server loads and protecting your website from high traffic spikes.
Therefore, a content delivery network is very important in order to enhance the speed of the website, because the location of the data centers helps to significantly reduce the load time.
(8) Less Http Request Helps a Lot
Load time can be significantly impacted by the number of page elements that are downloaded on your site each time a visitor comes to it. These include everything from images to stylesheets to scripts, and as much as 80 percent of the load time can be accounted for.
The best solution is to combine files to minimize the number of requests. That means putting everything in one stylesheet or combining scripts to the extent possible. It all comes down to lightweight code and best practices. The more each browser has to read, the longer it takes to load.
(9) Try To Keep Things Simple
As far as website development and design is concerned, it is essential just to avoid overcomplicating things based on the various factors such as including various features such as sliders, menus, and various other aspects because if there are too many unnecessary features on the website, then the things will load very slowly on the website.
Keeping things simple on your website will lead to far better results than keeping them complicated
Conclusion
Businesses depend on their websites for a variety of reasons, so when the loading time of a website causes the visitor to leave, it is generally not the right thing for their businesses. This is because all the hard work inside the website cannot be lost to the loading time of the website.
Therefore, businesses need to follow the tips discussed in the blog in order to improve their websites.