6 Ways to Improve Website Loading Speed
The loading speed of your website is a relatively new Google ranking factor, but it is a crucial one nevertheless. How quickly your website loads has become very important for search engines as well as human visitors.
It is believed that e-commerce websites that take more than 3 seconds to load lose almost 50% traffic. This is one of the reasons why so many e-commerce websites have upgraded their systems and used proven methods to ramp up their website loading time. In fact, many popular e-commerce websites now load in less than one second.
That’s right!
If you want to get in the good books of Google, you will also have to increase the loading speed of your website. It not only makes Google happy, but it also improves user experience, which is a crucial part of an overall SEO and digital marketing strategy.
In this post, we discuss 6 ways to increase your website’s loading speed.
1. Clean the Code
In today’s online world, clean and tidy code is a necessity. It not only makes it easier to run a website, but it also improves the loading speed — which ultimately makes the users happy.
Make sure that your code is perfectly clean and do not have issues like indentations, extra lines, extra spaces, and superfluous tags etc.
Avoid using JavaScript just for the sake of it — or just for having some creative fun. Simplicity is the need of the hour. Make your website simple, keep your code clean, and it should increase the loading speed of your website.
2. Minify HTML & CSS
Minifying HTML & CSS is another very effective way to improve the loading speed of your website.
If you don’t know what it is, understand minifying HTML & CSS as reducing the number of requests that helps you package and deliver data in the easiest and quickest way possible.
Read this article on minifying HTML & CSS or show it to your developer if it’s out of your zone.
3. Compress Images
Do you compress the images you publish on your website? I highly doubt it.
Nearly 45% of e-commerce websites don’t compress their images. It’s almost criminal.
However, by compressing images, you can easily increase the loading speed of a webpage.
There are a number of free tools and plugins that you can use to compress images to a reasonable size. TinyJPG, Compressor.io, or EWWW Image Optimizer are all great options.
If you are good with Adobe Photoshop, you can also use that to compress the size of images and making your page load faster.
4. Deliver Images via CDN
If you are a becoming a popular website, you can significantly cut down on the loading speed time by using a CDN.
CDN or Content Delivery Network delivers images to your website users from the closest possible server. Therefore, it cuts a significant amount of time and efforts required to deliver the images and load the webpage.
Although CDN costs extra, it is worth it if have a running online business and you can’t afford to lose any traffic, customers, or sales.
5. Slow Down on Plugins
If you are using WordPress, you know how tempting can be to try different plugins. Don’t!
The more third-party plugins you use, the slower your website becomes. Only use the necessary plugins that you absolutely can’t live without. For any other purposes, ask your developers to make do.
6. Upgrade Hosting Plans
If you are receiving 50,000 traffic visitors per month, you can’t run your website forever on a £2.99 GoDaddy shared website hosting plan.
A shared website hosting plan has limitations, and those limitations become more visible when you have a big website with a good amount of traffic. If you are serious about improving the loading speed of your website, you might have to consider upgrading.
Upgrade to a VPN or even a dedicated server to drastically improve the loading speed of your website.
Final Words
Nearly 75% of your traffic visitors will quit your website if it doesn’t load in the first 5 seconds. Make sure that they don’t do that to your website.
Improve the loading speed with the tips mentioned in this article. You will improve the user experience, make your website visitors happy, and search engines will also reward you for that with higher search engine rankings.
