You’re test-driving your new website and wondering if your website takes too long to load. In that case, there’s a big chance that your gut feeling is true. Thus, you need to check it quickly. If the test result isn’t looking so good, you need to optimize your website.
If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. In this article, we’ll present seven applicable ways to improve your page loading speed.
Why is Page Speed Important?
Page speed is the basis for your overall website user experience (UX) score. The longer your site loads, the bigger the possibility for your visitors to bounce. When that happens, your traffic will plummet, and so will your conversion rate.
Some studies reveal that users will leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load. On top of that, a website’s bounce rate will increase by 106% when it’s running into a six seconds page speed delay.
Additionally, page speed is also an important SEO factor. Therefore, monitor and improve your page speed if you’re looking to get on the first page of Google.
7 Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed
As page load time holds a vital role in improving your UX, you ought to make sure your site’s speed is stellar. Without further ado, let’s check the seven easy tips to improve your page loading speed.
1. Get Reliable and Fast Hosting
A shady hosting provider can get your site to load slowly. When the problem is with your provider, your site will still take too much time to load, no matter how hard you try to improve it. This is because the problem is at the server-level.
The Server Response Time’s (SRT) benchmark falls between 100 and 200 ms. You can check the hosting’s SRT before deciding to go with it with tools like Bitcatcha. That way, you can get a reliable web hosting service for your website.
2. Minimize Requests
Suppose a visitor clicks on one of your site’s menus. In that case, the visitors’ browser will request your server so that your website can display the page content.
Now, each page on your website contains lots of components. They can be text, images, videos, links, a chatbot, and the website’s theme. With all these elements calling for database and external HTTP requests, your page load time can be compromised.
To minimize requests, you can start by deleting heavy, unnecessary media and integrate lazy loading. You can also create a CSS image sprite to combine all your images, allowing your webserver to faster fetch the files. On top of that, make sure you only use trusted themes and plugins.
3. Minify Your Code
Poorly coded CSS, HTML, and JavaScript can result in heavier pages. The large file size comes from the unnecessary spaces, lines, breaks, and comments in your code. Thus, the more information your server needs to render, the longer it takes for your site to display its content.
Code minifying is the process of compressing the code file to the smallest size without compromising its function. You can easily do it with minifying plugins, such as Autoptimize and Fast Velocity Minify.
4. Enable Compression
Enabling the GNU Zip (GZIP) compression can also be an excellent way to reduce your website file size. With smaller sizes, your server can transfer the site file faster. Thus, your site’s performance can be improved.
Find out if your website has enabled the GZIP compression by checking it on a GZIP testing tool. Suppose your site hasn’t enabled the feature. In that case, go to your website’s control panel and locate the Optimize Website section. Through it, choose the Compress All Files menu. When the process is finished, your site is running on GZIP compression.
5. Optimize Your Images
While images can improve your UX, unoptimized ones are common causes for making a website sluggish. Therefore, use lossy or lossless compression to reduce your image sizes before uploading them on your website.
The former refers to an image compression method that allows you to get very small image sizes. However, lossy compression takes away some data from the original file, making the compressed images low in quality.
Meanwhile, the latter covers any image compression tool that can reduce image size without compromising its quality. If you want to put images on a portfolio and their detail will be the centrepiece of the page, it’s recommended to optimize your images using lossless compression.
One great lossless compression tool to try is TinyPNG. Should you host your site on WordPress, you can install the SmushIt plugin. It offers automated image optimization as you upload one. Another alternative is using stock photos, as they’ve been optimized for website use.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network
As locations affect your site’s speed, integrating Content Delivery Network (CDN) is highly recommended when your target audience is at the global level.
CDN allows you to save your site’s file on a globally distributed data center. Meaning, people all across the world can access your site conveniently no matter how far they live from your site’s main server.
One of the great CDN Integration providers is Cloudflare. It comprises flexible customization so that you can adjust the CDN settings based on your site’s needs.
7. Enable Page Caching
Caches save your static page’s information for faster retrieving. Thus, it allows your site to handle multiple requests at once. Not using this feature can cause your website’s server to be overloaded by requests. As a consequence, your site will take much more time to load.
To overcome this problem, you can install a caching plugin on your chosen Content Management System (CMS.) The W3TotalCache is a great plugin to install on WordPress. Apart from saving your running page, it also offers CDN Integration.
Conclusion
Improving a page loading speed is challenging. But, with the seven easy ways you’ve learned in this handy guide, we’re sure your website will run at light speed. On top of that, there’s always a tool that can help you achieve your goal. Therefore, get the work done and your site to shine!
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