Tips For Boosting Your Website Speed
Updated: March 24, 2020
Customers have high expectations when it comes to websites.
People move fast, and we expect our technology to move with us.
When an individual is looking for answers and information online, they make their way to a source’s website for direct solutions.
Once they open the link to access the site or type in the URL, the site has about 2 seconds before a person gets impatient and abandons your site.
Yes, really.
Only 2 seconds is all it takes for your website to prove itself to consumers before your exit rates begin to escalate.
What’s an exit rate?
Google Analytics defines exit rate as “For all pageviews to the page, Exit Rate is the percentage that were the last in the session.”
Whereas they define bounce rate as “For all sessions that start with the page, Bounce Rate is the percentage that were the only one of the session.”
So what does that mean?
You want both of these numbers to be low because you want people staying on your pages.
However, blogs typically have high bounce rates because users are viewing the content they clicked on and then exiting the page.
OK back to improving website speed.
Use the links in the table of contents to jump ahead to specific sections.
Tips for Boosting Website Speed
Why is slow website speed trouble for your business?
As previously stated, people move fast and expect technology to keep up with them.
Your website is your greatest asset when it comes to customer or lead interaction with your business.
Over 60% of users will take their business elsewhere if a business’s website is too slow to load.
Meaning you’re missing out on traffic to your site and experiencing decreasing conversion rates.
You want your website to keep up with potential customers and the current ones you have.
You want to meet their needs and expectations, so they stay on your site and on your side.
Maybe by now, you feel a little nervous about whether your site is actually fast enough or not?
Well, there’s one way to find out.
Run a speed test and see where you stand!
(Linked at the end of the blog.)
A speed test will run a quick test and will provide you with diagnostic information and suggestions for improvements, all for free!
Did your results come out a little less than satisfactory?
Don’t worry!
There’s always room to improve!
Let’s go over a few tips for boosting the speed and performance of your website so it runs faster than it ever has.
1. Minimize HTTP Requests
HTTP requests are requests made by the browser when someone visits your website.
These requests include HTML files, CSS, and JavaScript files.
The more of these files you have, the more requests your website will receive.
All of these requests can slow down the load time and performance of your website.
How do you minimize the number of requests?
There’s a number of ways.
· Combine the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files together so you have fewer files all together
· Reduce the number of elements on each page as much as possible. Less is more!
· Use CSS instead of images if possible
2. Compress Images
A majority of HTTP requests are images and can take up to 60% of the average bytes loaded per page.
Try your best to optimize those images flooding your page by removing any icon libraries, duplicate images, extra fonts, etc.
Instead, try replacing that image space with CSS such as colored background or a gradient instead.
After cleaning out and optimizing all those images, check out what you have left.
Are those images massive?
Most of the time, businesses download stock images and don’t always bother with resizing them to fit their page.
Stick to this basic list of what extensions to use for what type of image.
· PNG should be used for images that need a transparent background.
· JPG is great for photographs or any image where finer detail is less important.
· SVG works well for vector images that require a high amount of detail.
3. Browser Cache
Browser caching lets aspects of your site be downloaded on to your hard drive.
Once into a cache, or a temporary storage space where they are locally stored on your system.
This allows subsequent pages to load faster.
By making your first-page load fast enough, visitors are more enticed to spend time on the rest of your website.
The static aspects of your page are able to be cached for at least a week, and ideally much longer!
4. Upgrade Hosting Plan
When first creating your website, you may have had just half the content on it that you have now and perhaps chose a shared hosting option.
But by now, your business has grown, as has your website to reflect that growth.
You have nearly tripled the amount of content on your site and notice how slow it’s become.
There are a couple of options when deciding where to go from here.
· Move to a VPS. A Virtual Private Server may be your best bet. It uses multiple servers to distribute content as well as provides a scalable solution for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
· Dedicated Servers. With a dedicate server, you’ll get full control without sharing RAM or bandwidth since all of the resources are dedicated only to you. You get higher bandwidth limits, but with a lot less flexibility since you don’t have multiple computers. These options also cost more than moving to a VPS.
5. Remove Unnecessary Plugins
Each plugin on your page requires significant resources to run and more resources result in a slower website.
Aside from slowing down your website, too many plugins can also leave your site susceptible to security concerns and crashes.
Disable the plugins on your page to test and find out which ones are slowing down your server performance.
Keep in mind that it’s not all about the numbers.
The number of plugins on your page may not always be the biggest issue.
The greater concern for plugins often comes from their quality.
You may have 20 on your page that runs perfectly fine or 8 that really slows down your site.
Try to avoid plugins with a good amount of script, styles, and ability to perform multiple requests.
For example, social media sharing plugins have the capability to really affect your load time, so it’s best to embed those Facebook and Twitter buttons into the code of your website.
6. Change the Theme
You may have a reliable and well-performing server, but if your website has an overall complex code in the theme, this could be an easy fix to increase page efficiency.
Play around with different themes if you have the ability.
You can often do this without changing too much of the content of your website.
Make the performance of your page a priority over the aesthetic.
You can fix improve the appearance and overall look of the site after you know it’s going to run smoothly and efficiently for visitors.
Other Tips for Improving Website Speed:
Reduce redirects.
Minimize time to first byte.
Reduce server response time.
Run a compression audit.
Enable compression.
Use a CDN.
Use an external hosting platform. (Especially for videos!)
