Negosentro.com | Let’s get right down to the basics. The speed of your website is quite possibly the most important consideration you should have, whether you’re running a blog, a service website or an online store. Statistically, if your website takes more than 1-second to load, you’ll lose an estimated 40% of your users. That’s some hard-hitting figures you don’t want to be missing out on, do you?
According to Google studies, even a site loading more than 400 milliseconds can be too much for some people! With this in mind, here are eight simple yet effective techniques you can implement today to speed your website up!
Run a Speed Test
There’s no way you can start speeding up your website if you don’t know what you’re currently dealing with. Fortunately, there are a ton of online services you can use to check. Some of the most popular include WP Speed Test (for WordPress sites) or Pingdom. Alternatively, you can use Google’s own PageSpeed Insights.
With the results of both of these websites, you’ll find a grading of your page as well as all the relevant information you need to improve on, including the individual files that can be compressed, minified (see below) and the size and loading time of each web page you search. Use these tools as the foundation of your refining process.
Clean Up Your Website
As you were building your website, you may have tried and tested a variety of plugins, themes and images before you reached where you are today. As a result of this, you’ve probably got a ton of plugins and files sitting on your website, traces of which will still be downloaded to your user’s devices, therefore slowing the loading times. This means disabling and deleting anything you no longer need or use. Always remember to exercise care when doing this, so you don’t accidently delete anything that you may need!
Minifying Your Website
This may sound like an alien term, but it’s one of the easiest and effective ways to boost your loading speeds. If you’re using a WordPress website, there are a ton of plugins available that will do this for you. This process works by reducing and compressing the backend files of your website, naturally reducing the file size that your users have to download while using your website.
Alternatively, if you’re not using a WordPress site, there are a ton of websites and online tools where you can copy the HTML, CSS or Javascript code of your website, pasting it in to the tool to have it automatically minified, saving you both time and money.
Optimising Your Content
This tip will help you to speed up your website, boost your SEO ranking while decreasing your loading screens. Any existing content and all future content, whether it’s text, images or videos need to be optimised as much as possible. If you have a 5,000-word article that could be summarised in 1,000 words, you’ll dramatically reduce your loading speeds. While carrying out this task, you’ll also have the opportunity to proofread and edit your content to perfection.
It’s understandable, especially if you have a lot of content that carrying out this task can be extremely time-consuming. With this in mind, there is an extensive range of services available that can do it on your behalf. Some of the leading sites to find qualified writers include; Upwork, Write My X, People Per Hour and 1 Day 2 Write.
Optimising Your Images
The imagery you use on your website is crucial to your success. However, most website owners find it difficult to find a balance between quality and speeds. If you’re using high-quality, 10mb images, you’re going to experience extremely low loading times. The best way to counter this issue is to compress your images. Fortunately, there is an extensive range of plugins that can carry out this task to your existing images, reducing the file sizes with next to no difference in the visual quality.
When compressing your images, although you may doubt the quality, you’ll be looking for an average image size of around 250kb. That’s the maximum you’ll want to be uploading. If you have multiple images on a page, you’ll want even less than that.
Implement GZIP Compression
A website works by a user clicking on your URL to access the site. From here, a ‘call’ then contacts to your hosting servers to send the files to your user’s computer. The larger this file, the longer it will take to send. GZIP Compression is used to compress these files that are being sent, drastically reducing your page loading times.
“GZIP compression has now become one of the leading and most standard practices for increasing your page speeds, always resulting in a boost in the SEO ranking. In fact, this task is now incredibly easy, thanks to a whole range of plugins and services that are now readily available,” says Sharon Smith, a SEO expert at BritStudent and Next Coursework.
Update Your Hosting Servers
When you were starting out, you may have opted for a shared hosting service package due to limits on your budget or you simply didn’t need the bandwidth. However, as your server grows and the viewer count increases, it may be time to start thinking about upgrading your system. From shared hosting, you can upgrade to VPS, Cloud and even Dedicated, dramatically boosting your page loading times.
Even if you still feel a little uneasy at paying out for a more premium server, if you regain 40% of your readers through a faster-loading website, you’re guaranteed to make that money back.
Caching!
Search ‘How to Speed Up Your Website’, and you’ll be overloaded with results relating to caching your website because it’s such an important point that needs to be covered. In short, caching means that certain low-sized files are saved onto your user’s computer so the next time they visit your site, it will simply load the features from their hard drive rather than downloading from your server, drastically decreasing your loading times.
Final Thoughts
The speed of your website will have a dramatic impact on your user experience. The slower the loading times, the lower your visitor count and, naturally, the lower your conversion rate and the number of sales you’ll make. By implementing these steps, you’ll notice an instant boost in your page loading speeds, allowing you to regain that essential 40% of users.
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Katrina Hatchett is a lifestyle blogger at Academic Brits with a particular interest in the art of communication: a field in which she has cooperated on many projects. She is a regular contributor at Origin Writings, as well as a blogger at PhDKingdom avademic portal.
