Speed. Speed. Speed.
It seems like that’s all anyone ever talks about whenever the topic of websites comes up. You’ve probably even read dozens of posts about how to optimize website speed and ways to reduce page load time.
Well, who hasn’t?
We live in a fast-paced world, and nobody wants to wait around for a slow loading web page. People understand that time is money and wasting either isn’t ideal. In fact, according to a survey done by Akamai and Gomez, site visitors have become more intolerant than ever before. 47% of site visitors expect a web page to load within two seconds or less and 40% will abandon the web page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. They haven’t read your content or even gotten to the juicy parts of your web page yet. But they already have an impression about you.
Here’s the thing: If you don’t have a fast website, people will leave before they can get to see what you are all about. But website speed improvement is no easy task. Despite your best efforts, you could still have trouble delivering an exceptional user experience to your site visitors. Plus, it’s often hard to diagnose what’s causing your web page to run slower than usual. Thankfully there are plenty of website optimization tools you can use to fix your website.
And in this blog post, I will walk you through how to improve page load speed the easy way. There is no one size fits all solution here. But by the time you are done reading this, you’ll have a pretty good idea what you need to do to improve your website’s performance.
Sound good?
Let’s get right into it.
Enable Browser Caching
The easiest way to optimize your website speed is to enable browser caching. Let’s say for example the site visitor has already visited your site before. Browser caching allows your visitor’s browser to save copies of your sites individual pages so that when they return in future, they don’t have to wait around for the page to reload again. Resulting in faster load times.
Switch to Another Web Hosting
Every channel that works eventually outlives its purpose. Some fade away and others simply stop delivering excellent results. When you started, you probably picked a web hosting option that worked well enough. Its one thing when you are starting a website, but it’s an entirely different thing when you have increased traffic and a whole lot more to lose. At first, the web hosting will work well enough because you’re just trying to get some visibility. With increased traffic but, there’s bound to be a mismatch between your website and the hosting resulting in slower load times and increased downtime. So you’ll want to upgrade your web hosting to something that keeps your site fast and functional.
Reduce Your Redirects
Bloated websites have a lot going on. There’s way, too many links going into your main site and way too much overkill. All which no doubt are great and useful but also take a toll on the website loading speed too. To speed up web page loading, make sure that you keep the redirects to a bare minimum.
Fix All Broken Links
You probably already know about broken links. And if you’ve had a broken link before, you know that they not only clutter the search engine, but they also create a tremendous loss of revenue. One of the best ways to reduce page load time is to identify all the broken links and fix them.
Compress Your Website
One of the primary reasons why your site is taking long to load is because of the massive files and images cluttering the website. Sure, they look nice and colorful but they put a toll on the website and make it a tad slower. By compressing your files, you reduce the load on the website and improve the website’s overall speed. Luckily, there’s a variety of website speed optimization tools you can use to compress your files.
Reduce Page Requests
Requests are the elements a site visitor’s web page has to download for the visitor to see the element. The more parts your web page has the more requests that the site visitor has to contend with. If a lot of requests are generating from your web page, your website will eventually cave in, and this will result in slower loading times. Keeping the requests to a bare minimum will help improve the website speed.
Compress Images on the Site
Next up on our how to improve page load speed list is compressing images on the site. As I mentioned earlier, any small thing can clutter up the website and bloat it to slow speeds. And that includes images too. In fact, images take up 60% of the average bytes loaded per page. Compressing the image size reduces the file size and increases your websites overall performance.
Declutter Your Database
Although it might not seem like it, website databases can get pretty messy. And its expected seeing as its houses saved drafts, deactivated plugins and post revisions. Minimizing the number of things on your database helps speed up the time it takes to collect files from the database hence increasing the website’s overall speed.
Minify Your HTML
Minifying your HTML means removing and fixing unnecessary data from your website. It involves formatting, correcting the HTML coding and even shortening the code.
Implement the Use of Accelerated Mobile Pages
Lastly, you can implement AMPs to act as an alternative to declutter the unnecessary information so that the user only gets the information that most important to them.
Conclusion
And there you have it, folks! A comprehensive guide on how to improve page load speed. Of course, there’s a bazillion of other things that I didn’t include. But these are by far the most important. As always, we hope that this information will be helpful.
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