Nothing hurts your business more than a slow-loading website. These days, website speed is the first element that interacts with the customer and plays a crucial role in gaining that first impression. When your site loads slowly, it not just affects the site’s usability and user experience, but also ranks your site lower in the search engines. Site speed is now considered an important ranking factor by search engines for both mobile and desktop sites. You will also experience higher bounce rates as well. Optimizing your site speed is well worth the time spent and gives you a lot of benefits. So, how can you solve the slow loading problem of your site and give your customers the experience they demand? Given Below are a few ways.
1. Enable Caching
Browsers save static copies of your site’s files so that they can display the cached data to the visitors instead of reloading everything again. You can turn on caching to improve your site’s speed. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress you can install a plugin that lets you enable the whole site caching or caching-only certain elements of a site. You can also instruct the browsers about when they should display the cached version of your site and when they should display the new version. You need an expert hand to configure and leverage browser caching.
2. Optimize your images
Modern websites are loaded with large images and graphics. If you’re using un-optimized images it will harm your site speed. There are a few tricks to optimize your images so that your website loads faster
- Avoid using BMP and TIFF files
- Use JPGs for photos and PNGs for graphics
- Ensure that none of your images has the blank src attribute
- Install a plugin that will automatically reduce the size of the images without losing any visual quality.
3. Minimize your code
Your site will take a longer time to load if the code gets a little bit messy. You can optimize your coding by removing the elements like line breaks, spaces, and others that don’t need to be there or turning off certain scripts temporarily. Using tools like Pagespeed Insights Chrome Extension you can create a minimized version of your code to make it load faster. It’s also a good idea to minimize CSS and JavaScript files as well and store them in one place, instead of different files. If you do not have dynamic content, use HTML instead of PHP.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The speed of your site is affected by the distance between the user and the server where your site’s files are stored. The more the distance the slower your site will load. One of the best ways to solve this problem is to host your files on a content delivery network. A CDN hosts your site’s files across a large network of servers across the globe so that the users can download the files from the server that is closest to them. Through this, you can save up to 60% bandwidth, improve the loading speed of your site, and safeguard your site from traffic spikes and any threats.
5. Remove extra themes and plugins
Having too many plugins can not just reduce the loading speed of your website, but it is also more prone to security risks. It’s a smart way to remove any unwanted plugins to make your site function the way you want it to. The best way to do this is to go to your plugin list, remove one plugin at a time and perform a speed test. Through this way, you might be able to find out which plugin is harming your site’s speed. You can do it yourself or rely on a digital marketing company. They use specific tools to remove resource-hogging plugins and improve your site speed.
6. Reduce the redirects
Your site takes a long time to load when you have more than one redirect from the given URL to the final landing page. You can prefer 301 redirects instead of 404 errors. But they are still not perfect as it increases the time it takes for the browser to reach the exact version of the page. Always a redirect loop takes time to process, thereby reducing the speed of the site.
With the increasing number of mobile internet users, it’s never been as important as it is right now to fix up your site speed. Slow-loading pages mean lost business and a lousy user experience. Having a site that loads faster can give your user a better experience that will have a definitive impact on your business. You don’t have to be a digital marketer to find out if your website is loading slowly. When it comes to improving your site speed, there’s a lot other than these 6 points. There are a lot of digital marketing companies offering convenient, low-cost website optimization services that can optimize your site, improve its speed, and bring in more business for you.
