Maintaining your audience’s attention on your website depends on its quickness. Because they are impatient, internet consumers expect your website to load quickly when they click on it. According to half of users, they will abandon a website if the pages load too slowly. They want a website to load in three seconds or less.
This is a serious hit to your conversion rate, thus one of the most important things you can do is discover how to optimise the speed of your website. This blog offers advice on how to speed up websites to improve user experience.
Why You Should Speed Up Your Website
Faster-loading websites outperform slower-loading ones in a variety of marketing and SEO measures, including loyalty, conversion rate, bounce rate, abandonment rate, and organic search results.
How To Speed Up Your Website
1: Optimize Image Sizes
Images significantly impact your website’s speed. Although deleting large picture files won’t help speed up your website, it is still an alternative. Product photos are a crucial component of the online buying experience since customers want to view them before making a purchase.
Your website will load more quickly and users will be able to interact with your website’s components sooner if you lower the size of your photos. Cropping your image files to the right size is one of the simplest ways to resize them. Resize the image to 550px wide if that’s how you want it to appear. Resize your image files with the help of a search engine optimisation company to increase the speed at which your website loads.
2: Look Better Website Hosting
Most website owners frequently select the least expensive hosting package on offer. Although this is normally sufficient when you first start out, when your site starts to receive more traffic, you will need to update your hosting platform. Don’t approach this method thoughtlessly. Choose a platform you can trust by taking your time.
The least expensive hosting option available is shared hosting. Shared hosting works well for sites with modest traffic, but not so well for sites with high traffic. Additionally, when traffic spikes occur on other websites that use the same server as yours, the performance of your site will probably be impacted.
3: Simplify Your HTML
Simplify your HTML code to improve the speed of your website. The amount of data that is transferred to consumers is increased by bloated HTML. It may also affect how quickly JavaScript performs while DOM manipulation is being done. You are dealing with bloated HTML if you discover that your HTML pages have 5,000 or 6,000 lines of code before any content (yes, this does occur, even at Fortune 500 businesses).
4: Use a CDN
Reduce the amount of time information must travel from your server to the final user. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Using a CDN is one simple way to achieve that. A geographically dispersed collection of servers is called a content delivery network (CDN). A content delivery network (CDN) is a great way to speed up your website, regardless of whether it uses HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, photos, or videos.
5: Reduce font usage
The use of web fonts in website design has increased. Sadly, using them slows down how quickly pages load when a visitor views a website. Web fonts lengthen the time it takes for consumers to see web content by raising the amount of HTTP queries your website makes to outside sites.
SEO specialists advise adopting contemporary fonts and simply displaying the character sets on the page to minimise web font traffic.
6: Clean Up Media Library
It’s highly possible that outdated or underutilised photos have accumulated over time and clogged your media collection. This simply makes your website clogged. To achieve faster average page load times, purge extraneous photos and other media items from your media library.
7: Reduce plugins
Your website can be enhanced significantly by plugins. They can be used to enhance client satisfaction, add unique functionality, tidy up your code, and more.
Since plugins are simple to install, installing more without thinking through the possible drawbacks is simple. If your website has too many plugins, it may become slower, crash, or have other issues with functionality. Just include the most essential plugins on your website as a result of this. Regularly review the ones that are installed and delete any out-of-date or ineffective plugins.
8: Resolve 404 Errors
A 404 error indicates that a page is not accessible. When the content of a sought-after page is no longer available, the hosting platform notifies browsers. The user finds these situations annoying, so in order to improve the user experience, you should eliminate the 404 errors.
Use an error detection tool to locate the errors so that they can be fixed. If there is still traffic to the pages, try updating the link URL or setting up reroutes to send users to a useful page. One search engine optimisation tactic that will help you rank better is to keep the bounce rate low and make sure users stay on your page for longer.
9: Expires Headers
Expired Headers can help to reduce the page load time for repeat visitors to your website. They give the browser instructions on whether to fetch a file from the server or from its built-in cache.
This shortens the time it takes for a page to load by lowering the quantity of downloads from the server and HTTP requests.
