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6 effective ways to speed up your website

There are many reasons due to which your traffic decreases, here we have listed 6 tips that will help you speed up your website

By Ann R.Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago 7 min read
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Have you ever worked on a website that looks good but still fails to generate leads or doesn’t achieve the desired business results? Then I would like to know how long it takes for an average smartphone to load your website. And if your page loading speed is slow, then According to Google research, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, then the bounce rate rises by more than 100%, and the chance of conversions decreases by 95%.

In today’s digital world, the speedy website is the most important thing for your brand. It doesn’t matter if you have the most complex and attractive website if it takes so much time to load. The site speed creates the first impression of your business, so it is essential to understand that when it comes to user experience, you won’t get a second chance. Research shows that the amount of time a user will wait before losing focus from your website is hardly from 2 to 3 seconds. If your website takes longer than that, then the user will lose interest and will close the browser window. But if you reduce the page load time of the website, you will positively impact your marketing and sales processes. You will get higher traffic and attract more potential leads.

However, high-performance websites result in lower bounce rates, high return visits, higher conversion rates, higher ranks in organic search, and of course, they will have an overall better user experience. The bottom line is that slow websites will cost you money and will damage your business reputation. Research has shown that Google might be considering site speed as one of the important factors for determining rankings. So always remember that websites that load faster can rank higher on Google. In this article, at web design Jacksonville, we will give you some useful tips to help you speed up your website and improve your website’s performance.

1. Enable Compression

Compressing files is one of the simplest ways to minimize load times, and today using Gzip application for file compression is now considered standard practice. Gzip is a file format and software application for file compression, which essentially identifies strings of similar code in your text files, and then temporarily replaces them to make the files smaller. It also reduces the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are greater than 150 bytes. This file format works well with CSS and HTML because these files usually contain repeated code and whitespace. According to Yahoo, this can reduce loading time by up to 70%. Gzip is a perfect option for speeding up your website because 90% of today's Internet traffic travels through browsers that support it.

2. Reduce HTTP requests

According to research, 80% of a website’s load time is spent on loading the different sections of the webpage, like images, scripts, etc. For loading these sections HTTP requests are made for each one of them, so the more on-page components are there, the longer it takes for the web page to render. As each request takes time for completing, so if you have a lot of them then it can slow down your website speed. Hence, reducing your HTTP requests is very important to reduce your website loading time.

There are many ways to do this, and the first way to reducing your HTTP requests is to figure out how many your site currently makes, and you should eliminate the unnecessary requests. Find out how many minimum requests are required to render your website? If you are using Google Chrome, you can use the browser’s Developer Tools to see how many requests your site makes.

You should remove any unwanted elements like images, JavaScript files, stylesheets, etc. If you are using a CMS like WordPress you should remove unnecessary plugins as they often load extra files on each page. Now that you have trimmed everything you could, it’s time to optimize what’s left. Optimized websites will load all the necessary files in a single request for each.

3. Use a content delivery network

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a set of web servers that are used to distribute the load of delivering content. Essentially, copies of your website are stored at various, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more secure access to your website.

When your site is hosted on a single server, all user requests are sent to the same hardware. That’s why the time it takes to process each request increases. Besides that, when users are physically farther away from the server, then the load times are higher because the information has a farther distance to travel. With CDN, user requests are redirected to the closest server. As a result, the content is delivered quickly to the user, and also a website runs faster. This is a rather costly, but effective method to optimize the load time. Beyond the server that hosts your website, you can also use other networks of servers to minimize load times for your visitors.

4. Minimize the number of your JavaScript and CSS files

If your website contains a large number of JavaScript and CSS files, it can result in a lot of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access particular files. These requests are treated individually by the user’s browser and slow down the website speed. When you examine what’s causing the sites to load slowly, it may be due to a large amount of JavaScript files or CSS being loaded inefficiently. One of the drawbacks of WordPress and other content management systems is that any time you add a new plugin, a new JS or CSS file is generated. And if you reduce the number of these files this will undoubtedly speed up your website.

There are several ways to minify your files. The first way involves combining all of your files into one, so instead of calling ten separate JavaScript files, you simply place all of your JavaScript in one file. You can also minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly. For instance, you can use Script Minifier, WillPeavy, or Grunt tools. The second way is deleting white space and making your files smaller. If your site runs on WordPress, a plugin like WP Minify that automatically does all of this for you. Most of the well-optimized websites first minify JavaScript and CSS files and then combine them into single bundles.

5. Optimize the size of images

Images can play an important role in speeding up your website. If you want to run a successful E-commerce website, images are a vital part of it. A lot of photos, images, and graphics on your product pages improve engagement and conversion rate. But the negative side of the image use is that they are usually large files, and these files use a lot of server resources; hence they take more time to load and thus result in slower page load times. So make sure that your images are no larger than they need to be, you should always reduce their size.

The best way to minimize the image size is to compress images using tools such as ImageOptim, JPEGmini, or Kraken. You should also make sure that your images are in the proper file format (PNG format is generally best for graphics with less than 16 colors, while JPEGs are best for photographs) and that they are compressed for the website. Use CSS sprites to create a template for images that you use commonly on your sites such as buttons and icons. CSS sprites integrate your images into a single large image that loads all at once and then display only the sections that you want to show. This means that you are saving page load time by not making users wait for all images to load.

6. Reduce the unnecessary plugins on your website

Plugins are common components of each website that are usually used in content management systems like WordPress or other pre-built website platforms. They add specific features to your website. But, if you install too many plugins on your site, you need more resources to run them. As a result, the website speed decreases, and security problems can also appear.

So a website design company always recommends checking out your plugins list and making sure that you really need each plugin, and deleting unnecessary ones. First, run the performance tests on your page to determine which plugins are slowing down your site. The best solution is to keep only the ones that are absolutely important and ensure that they are kept up to date.

Conclusion

Currently, users now expect web pages to load in minimum time. If you fail to fulfill their expectations, you will lose a large amount of website traffic and, as a result, your revenue. So, Web Design Jacksonville experts will suggest applying the following basic yet effective website speed optimization strategies:

Check and analyze the key factors of website success, such as conversion, visibility, and usability.

Also, test your existing website speed and prioritize the pages that need the most focus in regarding these three factors.

Start your optimization with the most speed-reducing facets and focus on the pages that have the greatest impact on your conversion success.

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About the Creator

Ann R.

One of the best author at Yashaaglobal. Read about SEO, Digital Marketing, Web Design, Web development, App Development, Branding and Graphic Designing, Jacksonville SEO Company

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