Improving your website load times is a crucial component of any SEO strategy. A fast website will get a high rank in SERPs, increasing your organic traffic. Additionally, users tend to spend more time on websites that load quickly and are easy to navigate.
Similarly, if your website is slow, you can expect to see high bounce rates and a negative SEO penalty. We are presenting you with six ways to boost your website speed to get around these problems.
Check your current website speed
Most web designers understand that responsive web design and usability are website fundamentals you can’t do without. Unresponsive pages that take more than 2 seconds to load will frustrate your users, and they will be likely to leave. Therefore, it’s essential to do everything you can to ensure that your pages can deliver information to users as soon as they click on a button on your site. However, before we dive into the techniques you can use to boost your website speed, it might be good to assess your site’s current speed accurately. You can use this information as a benchmark and see how much you have managed to improve the load times.
Thankfully, there are numerous online tools you can use to analyze your website and its speed. If you are looking for a free solution that is easy to use, we recommend checking out Google PageSpeed Insights. It can give you detailed information on your website and measure how well it’s performing on both desktop and mobile. The Insights tool can also give you suggestions on what you can improve.
Ways to boost your website speed
Below, you will find the most effective ways to increase your website speed and improve user experience.
Clean up the code on your site
Excess files and bloat in your code could cause your site to load slowly. Minimize your site’s footprint by cleaning up the code and removing unnecessary elements. Some designers tend to get carried away when it comes to website features. However, the visitors to your site might not feel the same. Most of them would rather have a site that loads quickly than a feature-bloated mess that is barely chugging along. Sometimes, less is more, so you should go through your site’s code and clean it up.
Optimize your media files
High-resolution images and videos can take a long time to load. Thankfully, there is an easy solution to this problem. You can use web-friendly formats for all media you want to upload. Compress and resize your images, and remember to delete redundant copies from your site. When it comes to video files, your best option would be to upload them elsewhere and then post a link on your site. For example, YouTube lets you embed videos directly into your pages. It’s a good idea to improve your user engagement on another platform which is also owned by Google. Since Google owns YouTube, you will get an added benefit in the form of an SEO boost.
Improve your hosting
Unfortunately, some of the loading time issues might not directly result from your poor web design. Some of the loading issues could result from your chosen hosting service. Many small businesses go with a cheap hosting provider to save money. However, high quality usually comes with an appropriate price, and you have to be realistic that some risks are involved with cheap hosting. Certain hosting providers will limit the bandwidth of your website.
You can talk to your provider to see if they offer better packages with higher speeds. Perhaps you will be able to upgrade and get a hosting package that better suits your needs. If it isn’t possible to upgrade your hosting with your old provider, you can always explore other hosting options. They aren’t the only provider in the world.
Cache your pages
Caching is a technique that stores copies of the files from your site. When a page needs the same files, they don’t need to go through your server again. By reducing the number of requests your server needs to respond to, you will significantly improve the loading time of the pages on your site. You can also implement browser caching to have the browser store various files so that you don’t have to reload the entire page for every visit.
If you are using WordPress as the platform of choice for your site, there are internal cache plugins you can use. Plugins can provide you with many cool features; they can help with SEO and even offer ways to boost your website speed. What’s best is that you don’t even need to be an expert web designer to use them.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs are also sometimes known as Content Distribution Networks, and they function by distributing copies of your website to other servers. These additional servers can be located across the globe, so when a user requests information from your website, it can be delivered from a nearby server. You can use a CDN to speed up loading times since the files are always loaded from the nearest node. This also makes your website more resilient to crashing since multiple versions of the site are available on the internet.
Clean up your database
Over time, your database will probably accumulate plenty of unneeded files. This problem is particularly noticeable with WordPress websites due to many saved drafts, old plugins, and stored backups. Having several backups for your site to choose from can be handy, but how many do you need. You should occasionally perform maintenance on your site and delete all the redundant clutter causing your website to load slowly.
Website speed is an essential factor influencing what kind of experience users have on your site. We’ve explained six ways to boost your website speed; now, it’s time to optimize your site’s performance. You will be able to notice a significant improvement in the load times, and you will also reduce bounce rates and improve lead generation by having users stick around longer.
Meta description: Users will leave your website if it takes too long to load. Thankfully, you can optimize its performance. Here are 6 ways to boost your website speed.