Little known ways to make your website load faster
As page speed significantly increases search ranking, it is essential to learn some practical ways to make your website load faster. A slow website is very frustrating not only to the end user, but it is also not good for search engine optimization (SEO). As a business, you do not want to have to face this because your website will rank lower than it ideally should. This will ultimately lead to fewer views on the site, less customer conversion, and less advertisement revenue.
Many factors determine how long pages on your website load. As a website owner, you need to identify those factors and know the best way to increase the speed to improve the user’s experience.
Efficient Ways to speed up your website
To work on the speed of your website there are a couple of things that you can do, and they include;
- Reduce Image sizes
The images you upload on your website play a significant role in the site speed. Large files definitely slow down the page tremendously because they take a lot of bandwidth. For your website to remain fast, you need to optimize the images. You can do this by reducing the size without in any way minimizing the quality. This can also be accomplished by using a plugin. Install the WP Smush.it plugin. It will automatically compress your images. The plugin can compress the pictures while at the same time ensuring that the visual quality is not touched. The amazing fact about this is that it runs in the background when a new image is being uploaded. You can also choose to run this plugin retrospectively on every image that is uploaded to your media library.
- Leverage on Browser caching
Enabling caching on your website improves your speed significantly. Besides, it also gives the user a more rewarding experience. Page caching is when your web pages store the static files to enable the user to access the page quickly. The static files stores include HTML documents, images, CSS, media files and JavaScript files. The speed increases because the database does not have to retrieve data each time a new request is brought in. Ideally, when a user visits the website, what they are trying to access is downloaded and stored automatically on their hard drive. The next time they visit, the page loads quickly because there is no need to send an HTTP request to the server. Some of the ways you can leverage browser caching include;
- Optimizing your caching strategy
- Changing the request header of the website’s resources to use caching
- Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
You should host your media files on a CDN so that your site can load faster. Using a CDN saves up to sixty percent of bandwidth. It also saves on half the number of requests received by the website. Ideally, CDN hosts your files across many networks of servers from all over the world.
In the event that you visit a site, the files download from the closest server to them. It ensures quick deployment of your website’s static content and delivering them to a location close to the visitor of the website. This is quite effective because the bandwidth spreads across many servers. This therefore significantly reduces the load on the singles servers.
Using CDN is a fantastic way to boost speed and also reduce resource usage.
- Theme
Invest in a theme that allows you to make optimization on your site speed. Your website will be slow if the site’s theme has a complex code. This is regardless of how good your server configurations are. Sometimes when you change the theme on the website you will realize that there is a significant change in the page load time. The very first time you are setting up your website make sure that the theme and the design is great to avoid encountering speed problems later.
- Fix broken links
Broken links in your image URLs, JavaScript and CSS can greatly affect your website ‘speed. They can also occur when content migrates to another domain or when the permalinks are changed. To fix this, include a 301 redirect to the new destination. Check this links regularly so that if there is any broken link it can be fixed immediately without affecting the speed. Before publishing your website, put it through a broken link test first.
- Reduce HTTP requests
Too many Http requests make so many sites to slow down hence reduce functionality. Too many requests greatly impact the pages load speed and ultimately affects SEO, bounce rate and user experience. You need to understand these requests so that you are in a better position of eliminating them. First off, to see how many requests any page on your site makes, you need to do a speed test by running it on Pingdom. Pigdom will allow you to sort the different requests by load time and size.
- Compress your website with Gzip
If you are looking to compress your website’s files, Gzip is a simple method to use. It will greatly speed up the load time by saving bandwidth. How this works is, it compresses the files into a zip file. The zip file is faster for the user’s browser to load.
- Disable hotlinking
Disabling hotlinking will speed up your website immensely. Failure to do so, allows other users to keep using the content hosted on your server. They use this content for their websites. This causes a lot of server load which in turn reduces the speed for no reason. For you to do that, some great tools will help generate the right code for your server.
As opposed to just disabling the hotlinking, you can avoid it altogether.
- Upgrade your web hosting plan
When creating a website, most people opt for cheaper hosting plans which is basically shared hosting. While this may still grow your website, it will make it slow down eventually. It is therefore prudent to upgrade the web hosting plan as it is the easiest way to increase your website’s speed. Move to a dedicated option or VPS if you have the shared hosting. The choice you will settle on will depend on your business needs hence do your research well. This is an effective way to speed up your website.
- Reduce the plugins your using on your website
In as much as plugins are great for your website and add a lot of value to it, too much of them will bring some issues. They can create security issues, cause crashes, slow down your website and some major technical issues.
Since you do not need every plugin out there, download and install only the necessary plugins. In addition to that you should also;
- Get rid of plugins for tasks you can do manually
- Test your plugin
- Identify overlaps in functionality
Conclusion
Speed is critical for a website. It has a major effect on page views, traffic, conversions, and the overall reputation. Your website speed provides a good user experience. It should, therefore, be a top priority if you want to remain competitive in the business. The great user experience will not only ultimately build a strong brand but it will also build a strong customer base for your business. To learn more you on how to speed your website you can also check How to score for google page speed insights
