If you have ever had to browse a problematic website, then you’ll tell when a page will take ages to load. Indeed, as users, we are all demanding, impatient. Indeed, more recent studies reveal that three seconds seems to push the indifferent visitors away from your site. Hence, if your website is not offering its optimal performance, then it is high time to do something. Here are five friendly tips that will help you to increase a speed of your site and make a site significantly faster. But before we proceed, lets the basics.
Why is Website Speed Important?
Website speed is crucial in today’s world to get good ranking from search engine and to provide enough facility from which internet users can easily find their contexts.
The effects of a slow site are thus, Channeling your resources towards a fast site is thus important in the following three ways.
- Having a slow site will hurt your Google ranking.This means that a slow site will be anathema to your Google rank. Google then for the first time used Google page experience as a new element of its search algorithm in June 2021. The different factors that constitute Google Page Experience include; Mobile-Friendly, Secure, HTTPs, AN, and CWVs. In the case of the page speed element of Core Web Vitals, Google looks at the time taken by the largest object (image, content, etc. ) to load on the page.
- Poor site speed drives people away. This is because; nothing is as off-putting as a site that takes ages to load. Today there are immediately countless of them, and if your website does not meet the expectations of the visitors, they will leave and go to others. Today it became a norm for the pages to be loading in 2 seconds or even less; one investigation showed that 40% of users leave the site if it took more than 3 seconds to load. And mobile users are even less patient — 53% of Mobile users abandoned a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load , says Google.
- A slow website will hurt your bottom line. Imagine your site is running slowly, and the attendant consequence to your profits will not be pleasant. A slow website does not only dump your rank and infuriate your clients, it will lose you visitors, leads, conversions, and sales. One such survey said that every second of delay in page speed reduced view rate by 11 percent and conversion rate by 7 percent.
What Affects Site Speed
A lot of factors can be the reasons as to why your site load time lags, but generally, it's only these main types:
- Heavy use of CSS and JavaScript
- Bad server/hosting plan
- Large image sizes
- Neglecting browser cache
- Too many widgets and plugins
- Hotlinking images and all kinds of resources from slow servers
- Amount of traffic
- Older browsers
- Slow network connection – generally speaking this is the case for mobile devices.
Meaning you have a whole spectrum of steps you can do to improve page speed, which I will cover further down in this post. But before you do any troubleshooting in regards to improving website performance, you need to test your page load time.
How to Check the Speed of Your Website
Now that you know how important site speed is, how can you check your site's performance? Test your page speed with one of these free tools that allow you to enter your site's URL and get scores for speed, optimization, and other factors and get suggestions on how to improve your site speed.
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Google Test My Site
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- GTmetrix
- WebPageTest
5 Tips to Make Your Website Faster
5 Tips for Improving Your Content to Maximize Website Speed
Improving your blog, news, press, or other published content for website speed optimization isn’t hard, and can be achieved pretty simply. But it does take some planning, and a little knowledge as to best practices.
Let’s keep things mostly out of the technical, all-site realm of pagespeed and focus mainly on the factors that will impact your content.
Optimize Your Images
Who doesn’t like a good PNG or JPG?—as with most other things, high-quality informative images are generally among the most valuable types of content you can include on your site. Even so, it can be a problem if the visual assets you use are too large because they will take a long time (and considerable computer power) to load. That can really slow down your site and your pagespeed especially when viewed from a mobile devise.
For those who are searching for the means to make your imagery lighter and therefore your site to load faster, try using one of the collapsing tools like TinyPNG to maintain your images on the compact side while not losing much of the quality.
As an analogy you could try emphasizing the aspect of sizing for mobile devices on your image optimization efforts. This is good, as it will mean that you are loading thinner images which will load quickly on mobiles and won’t need much resizing done by your styling.
Consider Asynchronous Loading
All your users are going to scroll down your pages from top to bottom and as much as possible they will not require access to the bottom portion immediately. Still, nobody’s screen is that length.
Why then not load your whole page of content at once and rather have them load as the user scrolls to meet them?
This is known as asynchronous loading and it is a nifty way to bring your on-page content lower down the page and as the user scrolls. That way, images and other media, in addition to the text and other plugins, can easily be told to load only when necessary.
Asynchronous loading is sent useful for lessening the quantity of heavy lifting your site requires when the page is loaded initially and which may aid your pagespeed.
Page Compensation Involving Turning On Browser Caching
Have one of your blog posts be an absolute jam that your users continiously come back to?
They have probably been to the page before and perhaps resourced their browser, perhaps made efforts to view the content, why, should they be forced to pull down each time they desire?
This is a way to allow users get a copy at least of the page they most recently viewed at a considerably faster than it normally would have been; it is achieved through the use of cache in the browser. Even though this may not necessarily be the most current version of the page it can allow for going straight to that content with relative ease and fortification even in the absence of an online connection, that is, for reference purposes.
SEO Boost your site performance as long as the content of the page or design has not changed frequently for each page in your site you are fine.
Reduction of the numbers of redirects
Everyone like to change blog posts and redesign old posts and sometime it require to redirect a true 301 to the new and updated content. As is often the case, it is particularly important in circumstances such as URL change or content migration to another part of website.
But, overuse turns the natural process into a nuisance for your pagespeed because an additional action, the request processing and the redirection of the user, is added to your site’s workload for each visitor of the page.
Unfortunately, in regard to this issue, there is not much that can be done to prevent or side step it. A redirect is a redirect, and at times they are inevitable—just ensure that you are not using many redirects on your site as would be desirable.
Reduce Your CSS, HTML and Javascript
This tip is a little more technical than the others, but it could make a big difference if your website utilizes a lot of Javascript, custom styling or plugins.
Another issue that is present in many current or prehistoric sites, where a lot of Javascript or styling is used, often with changes made manually over time as more adds and modifies are made, large scripts or un-optimized code can sometimes slow down your page speed because this code has to load first before the main content.
One can also try and compress the amount of CSS, HTML, and Javascript that is to be loaded hence make the loading process faster. This partly includes a technique known as minifying, where it is possible to reduce the amount of whitespace found in a design, unwanted CSS, where necessary the code can be condensed (or the code itself shortened) so as to quickly load the rest of the design.
Look at minify tools to check your code for any unnecessary delays all over your site and your key content will be benefited probably.
Wrapping Up
The reason why it is essential to increase the loading speed of your website is that the faster online presence of your site entails better user experience and enhanced site performance. By doing these practicies like optimizing images, Consider Asynchronous Loading, Reduction of the numbers of redirects, Reduce Your CSS, HTML and Javascript , you can significantly boost your site's performance.
However, as with most website optimisation for speed, this is a work in progress and should be continually monitored. By carrying frequent checks on your site’s performance and making necessary changes, you will be able quickly combat the competition and keep your website speedy.
Hence, whether you have opted for affordable shared hosting or Linux web hosting or if you are being particular about the high end Linux web hosting, the information mentioned above will assist you in enhancing your site’s performance and therefore making your visitors happy.
FAQs
What are the causes of low website speed?
There are many reasons why your website may have a slow loading speed. Some common causes are huge and uncompressed images, many and unnecessary plugins or scripts, lack of resources in the hosting plan, outdate software, and complicated design. However, other factors such as high traffic loads, server complications or network difficulties can also make the pages to take long to load.
How to get my website faster without paying for anything?
Here, we’ll look at some of the steps you can take if you want to raise your website’s speed and do it for free. First, reduce the number of HTTP requests by using only the necessary scripts and stylesheets and, if possible, place all of them into one. Second, enable browser caching through HTTP expiration on statics and compress your files using gzip. Also, limit the usage of versatile plugins and scripts, and include CDN to expand content delivery. Last but not the least, define regular updates to the website’s platform and also to the plugins for the sake of the continually established enhancements in efficacy and consistence.
How to boost the WordPress website speed?
The first step towards making your WordPress website faster is to begin with a simple theme, and then scale down the images before using them. Do not use too many plugins; stick to the few that function optimally, and are required. Employ a caching plugin to store the content and minimize the number of requests sent to the server. Let browsers cache some data and make an efficient content delivery network disseminate the content in question. Don’t make images and videos load for a particular page at least until the person gets to see them. WordPress suggests getting updates for the core and thematic and plugins to improve the speed and security of the website.
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