Web page speed is still overlooked by website owners, despite being among the most important factors that affect user experience.
Fast speed makes potential customers happy and gives them a positive experience about your business, while slow speed frustrates them and sends them away even before they land on your business website.
Because of this, you should focus on improving your page speed to improve your user experience, conversion rate, and long-term business success.
Here are 8 tips you can implement today to speed up your site:
1. Invest in a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Every time visitors click on your website link, your server pulls out your website data and sends it physically to their laptops, desktops, and mobile devices.
Because of this, visitors close to the server receive your site data faster and enjoy faster load times, while those living farther away have to wait longer for your website pages to load.
Signing up for a content delivery network ensures that all your website visitors enjoy a super-fast loading speed irrespective of where they’re in the world.
The network does so by distributing copies of your website files on several geographically different servers around the globe. When someone visits your site, the server closest to them pulls out your data and sends it to their browsers.
This helps to ensure that the requested content is served to your website visitors much faster.
2. Reduce Your File Size
Images are among the biggest, weightiest, and slowest-loading elements on your website. You should consider reducing their size to improve your page load speed.
Start by removing all the image files that your website can do without, like colored backgrounds, unnecessary custom fonts, etc.
Next, look at the images you have left. If they’re more than 1MB in size, consider cropping them to reduce their sizes.
You can also use GZIP to compress your Javascript, HTML, PHP, and CSS files. GZIP is a compression technology that allows you to reduce the size of your web files by up to 30% before they’re sent to your visitors’ browsers.
All these methods will ensure that the files being transferred from the server to your visitors’ browsers are much smaller in size. And the smaller the size of your files, the less time they’ll take to load.
3. Choose the Right Hosting Plan for Your Business Website
Another way to speed up your site is by upgrading from a shared hosting plan to either dedicated hosting, VPS (virtual private server) hosting, or cloud hosting.
In shared hosting, your business website is hosted on the same server alongside numerous other websites, which means that your website has to compete for the resources available with other hosted sites.
If one of the hosted sites uses more than their designated server resources due to a traffic surge, your page speed slows down.
Dedicated, VPS, and cloud hosting, on the other hand, offer more bandwidth and more control over server resources, which ensures optimum website performance. Let’s look at each of them briefly:
Dedicated Hosting
In dedicated hosting, only one website is hosted on a server. This gives you complete control of the server resources and eliminates the risk of suffering from slow speeds due to traffic surges from other sites.
VPS Hosting
In VPS hosting, several websites are hosted on the same server. However, each site has a virtual spot that’s dedicated to it alone.
Because the spot is virtual, you get more server resources, which helps to eliminate traffic-related speed issues.
Cloud Hosting
Lastly, cloud hosting offers more resources and flexibility by hosting several websites on a network of physical and virtual servers.
In case there’s a traffic surge, the virtual servers scale up their capacity to handle it. This ensures that your page load speed isn’t affected.
Whichever hosting plan you choose is up to you. Just make sure you take the size of your business website and budget into consideration while making your decision.
4. Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins
Plugins also offer numerous benefits to your WordPress website. For instance, you can use them to:
- Increase your site speed
- Optimize your content for search engines
- Clean up your code
- Add live chat and contact forms to your site to engage with visitors easily
With all these benefits, you may find yourself installing tons of plugins over the years without considering the downside of doing so.
These downsides include slowing down your site, causing security issues, and requiring too much time and energy to keep them updated.
It’s a good idea to go through your installed plugins one by one and uninstall whatever you don’t use currently.
This will not only help to speed up your site but also make it easier for you to maintain the remaining plugins in the long run.
5. Limit redirects
When you have too many redirects to other pages, it takes longer for your server to find and fully load the correct page.
This is why you should consider limiting the number of redirects you have to improve your page speed.
6. Trim Your Code
Too much coding also makes your file size larger, which slows down your page. So, get rid of all unused code plus unnecessary characters, formatting, and spaces to decrease your file size and improve your load speed.
7. Enable Browser Caching
You can also increase your page speed by turning on browser caching. This is a technique that examines every web page your users have visited recently and identifies the components that can be downloaded and saved temporarily in their local computers.
These components are usually the parts of your business website that change rarely, such as banners, logos, images, contact information, Javascript/CSS code, etc.
Once these static components are stored in your web users’ computers, there’s no need to download them again the next time they visit your website.
This means fewer requests will be made to the server in their subsequent visits leading to faster load speed.
8. Host Videos on External Platforms
Lastly, videos add so much value to your website. Apart from being entertaining, they help to build trust and a strong bond with your website visitors by giving your brand, products, and services a personality. In addition, they also improve your SEO rankings, make you stand out from the competition, and increase your reach.
However, videos can also make your site terribly slow because they take up lots of storage space. If you’re hosting your videos on a shared server with limited bandwidth, they can exceed your allocated server resources very quickly, leading to slow page speeds.
It’s advisable to host your videos on third-party hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, and then embed them on your website. This simple act will save you lots of space and improve your load speed tremendously.
Wrapping Up
To summarize, speed is crucial for the long-term success of your business website. Even a slight improvement in your page speed can reduce your bounce rate, improve your user experience, boost your conversions and improve your SEO rankings.
So, be sure to implement the above tips to improve your page speed today and enjoy these benefits and much more.
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