How to Improve your Website’s Speed

If you’re wondering why your website conversion rate is painfully low after investing a lot of time (and money) into it, then you probably haven’t considered its page speed.

Did you know that a whopping 1% of a business’s revenue is lost for every second a page takes to load? With statistics like that, there’s no denying that page speed has a lot to do with the success of your business. Find a website designer near you.

Unfortunately, improving your website’s speed is harder than you might think. There are multiple reasons why your website load time could be struggling. Here are five tried and tested ways that are effective in tackling the issue. 

Use A CDN

The internet has given businesses a unique opportunity to reach customers across all corners of the globe. However, delivering great web performance and user experience across continents can be tricky. That’s where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes in. A CDN distributes your website in servers located in different regions of the world, reducing the distance the information travels to the end-user. Cloudflare is one of the most recognized CDN providers, but there are many other options available. 

Get rid of pop-ups 

If you think the only purpose of pop-ups is to irritate users with annoying and irrelevant spammy ads, then think again. In the contemporary world of web design, they are regularly used by businesses as a form of promotion. While they can prove effective for promotional purposes, they need to be loaded on top of your website content, reducing the overall page speed. 

Google PageSpeed

Google PageSpeed is a handy tool that analyses your website’s page speed performance. It will dissect all of the factors affecting your page load speed, displaying it in a simple rating out of 100 formats. The lower the score, the more issues you have to deal with. Bear in mind that many of the problems identified are pretty technical, so you may need someone with knowledge of website technicalities on hand to interpret it for you. 

Image optimization 

Images are often a major culprit for sites with slow page speed. Heavy visual content on websites, including motion graphics, images, and videos, could contribute to your slow load time. Rather than removing your images, you can always optimize them. You can do this by choosing the right file format, image resizing, and reducing image dimensions. You can also find an abundance of free image optimization tools online to do the legwork for you, such as Adobe Photoshop, or JPEG optimizer. 

Keep redirects to a minimum 

Every time a page redirects to a new page, this will add waiting time for the user as the HTTP request-response cycle completes. While redirects send users to the correct pages on your website, they can significantly slow down your page speed. By reducing the number of redirects on your website, you can improve its page speed considerably. 

In summary 

By carrying out frequent audits of your website speed, you can keep on top of its performance and take action when you need to. However, if you’re not accustomed to the technicalities of websites you might need to get a web designer or web developer in to identify and tackle the issue, especially as the root of the problem causing your page to load slowly isn’t always obvious.

However, the above points should set you on the right path to identifying the problem so you can start to resolve the issue yourself.

Photo by Mark Timberlake on Unsplash