A slow website that takes more than a couple of seconds to load is one of the greatest reasons why visitors abandon a web page.
How to Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed?
The online world is where patience runs thin—people want access to information fast and easy, and if your site does not address this crucial need, your visitors will have no qualms about switching to a competitor.
So what constitutes a good loading speed?
The loading speed of less than one second is considered brilliant, while a speed of between one and three seconds is considered better than average.
If your site takes anywhere between 3 and 10 second (or more), you need to take corrective measures as you could be losing an unbelievable number of leads because your web pages take too long to download on their devices.
To simplify, you must target speed of no more than 1.5 seconds if you don’t want to lose out on a major portion of your site traffic to poor load speed.
Once you know the loading speed of your web pages (there are online tools for that), work with your developer or an independent expert to improve it.
Here are some key measures that will help you create a superfast website and improve your conversion rates.
Host your media files on a CDN
One of the most effective ways, when you are exploring how to improve your website’s loading speed, is by hosting your heavy media files on a CDN (content delivery network).
Doing this alone can drastically reduce the number of requests made by your site. Hosting media files on a CDN not only saves over 50% of your bandwidth, but it also limits the load on a single server (as a CDN hosts your files on a number of servers around the world).
Host your site on a good server
When you first built your website, you may have rightfully picked an average hosting service that suited your budget at the time and provided a level of service that was good enough for your needs back then.
However, as you move forward and scale your online business, you need a web hosting platform that can adapt itself to the growing traffic your site commands.
A poor hosting plan can jeopardize the growth of your website and thereby your revenues. Slow loading speed and other issues are part and parcel of cheap hosting plans.
So upgrade your hosting plan or switch to a different hosting service that has the infrastructure and support services that will help you create a secure and fast website and improve your website’s loading speed.
A good hosting platform serves as the backbone of a website that’s fast, secure, and highly functional, which directly affects conversion rates and thereby your revenues.
Control the number of HTTP requests
Each time a web page loads for a visitor, everything on that page (images, text, video, font, script, etc.) needs to download so that the viewer can see the page properly.
Each of these design elements will require an HTTP request of its own, which means that the more design elements you have on a page the more its loading speed.
But this in no way means that you should have simple-looking and uninteresting pages to improve your load speed. Here’s what you need to do:
Using browser tools to check the number of HTTP requests on a web page on your site. This will also show you how much time each page takes to load completely along with the list of elements making those HTTP requests.
Next, you may choose to remove some of the unnecessary items on that page. Alternatively, you can reduce the file size of some of the design elements (such as images).
Another way to reduce HTTP requests for a page is by combining the CSS or JavaScript files for each page.
Purge your plugins
A number of websites use more plugins than they need, simply because so many good plugins are available for free. Each additional script or plugin affects site speed, which is why you should regularly review your plugins and remove those that don’t serve an important purpose but could be hampering your site’s performance.
In case you find that you cannot lose a plugin that is slowing down the site, look for an alternative that would do the same job without impacting the site.
And, most importantly, control the urge to add new plug-ins without first considering if they’re worth the trouble.
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