Expert Tips For Speeding Up Your Website

People are impatient. We expect rides across town to arrive within minutes, if not seconds, of pressing a button. Groceries now can be selected, bought, and delivered all without having to leave the couch, let alone wait in a checkout line.

With nearly instantaneous satisfaction being the standard, it’s no surprise that people these days wouldn’t dare wait for a website to load while browsing the Internet to kill time or in search of items to purchase.

Our need for instant gratification means that website speed is more crucial now than ever before. In this article, we will discuss some best practices for speeding up your website.

Manage your total file size

One significant indicator of a slowed or bogged down a website is a massive number of all the files, scripts, and images needed for your website to display correctly. The fewer files, scripts, and photos your site requires, the faster it will be.

Simply put, less clutter means a smoother, faster, and more responsive website.

To help reduce the total file size number, try shrinking your images. It’s a safe bet that you probably display images that need adequate sizing if your site runs slowly.

Use a content distribution network (CDN)

A content distribution network or CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers to reduce the stress put on just a single server to deliver content.

It’s applying the old saying “the more, the merrier,” meaning the more servers there are to help lighten the load, the faster things go.

Reduce redirects

Each time one-page loads to another page, visitors have to wait for that page to load. Suppose you have an endless number of redirects on your website. In that case, your design probably isn’t optimal, and the number of pages in the chain needing to load continues to increase while simultaneously slowing everything down.

Reduce Cookie Size

Cookies are used for a variety of reasons, such as authentication and personalization. Information about cookies is exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It’s essential to keep the cookies’ size as low as possible to minimize the user’s response time.

Be mindful of setting cookies at the appropriate domain level, so other sub-domains are not affected.

Remove unnecessary plug-ins

It’s easy to go a little too plug-in happy and install far too many. Especially if you’re using a platform like WordPress, plug-ins might be free, but they take a toll on your database.

Use compression

The smaller your files, the faster your pages will load. Compressing files is one of the quickest ways to reduce load times. Enabling compression with Gzip is considered standard practice.

Gzip is a file format and software application that locates strings of similar code in your text files, then temporarily replaces them to make the files smaller – thus increasing your website speed.

Make use of Caching

If you want a fast, responsive website caching is a great place to start. Caching can get pretty technical. But the basics are relatively straightforward. In simple, plain English, caching allows your webserver to send a web page at a much faster pace to a browser after it has already been delivered once.

Speedy transmission of information from your server to the user’s browser ensures your web pages load up smoothly.

Choose a good host

The web hosting provider you choose, as well as the type of plan you sign up for, can have a massive impact on your site’s performance. Many small business owners opt to go with a shared hosting plan for its affordability and ease of use.

But if you have a thriving business that attracts a large amount of traffic or your website requires a lot of data for things like streaming videos or custom apps, a shared host isn’t going to get the job done. The stressed bandwidth and RAM will cause your site’s performance to suffer and users to have a poor experience.

If this is you, a dedicated hosting plan may be a better fit.

Before choosing a website hosting plan, evaluate your business by looking at where you are currently and from a growth mindset.

Regardless of the plan, you choose your provider to provide you with a certain baseline performance level. If they can’t, you might want to look into getting a new host.

Is speed optimization necessary?

The short answer is yes.

In business, time is money, so everything, including how fast your website loads content, needs to be optimized to achieve peak performance.

If you’re not getting the traffic you believe you should, or maybe visitors aren’t spending as much time on your side as you would like, all of these are reasons to ensure your website performs optimally.

As with everything in life, there can be multiple reasons for an issue. Don’t obsess and try to solve every single problem. Instead, you can only start running a speed test to identify the most severe issues and start with those first.

Your website speed can affect your business’s crucial aspects, from page traffic to bounce rate, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, conversions, and repeat purchase rate.

Is your bottom line important to you?

If your bottom line is essential to you, don’t fall into the trap of ignoring your website performance. While this article is filled with plenty of things you can do to stay aware of and increase your website speed, the easiest and least time-consuming thing you can do is hire professionals like us at Agency Partner.

Our full-service digital marketing agency is tailor-made with you in mind. From web and app development to brand strategy, social media marketing, and everything in between, we have you covered.

If your website is not delivering the results, you expect our web development experts can not only sit down with you and brainstorm, diagnose, and solve the issue, but we can identify areas for increased marketing opportunities and so much more.

Contact us now, and let’s get your website working the way you envision it.

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