This post will explain Want to Increase Website Speed. Do you know website speed is one of the significant factors in determining the ranking of search results? If you are wondering as to why you have a high bounce rate, well, blame it on the speed of webpage loading. And, if you have an e-Commerce website, you may lose potential customers if your checkout page is slower than the competitors.
Want to Increase Website Speed? Check out these 10 Tips
In this article, you can know about Want to Increase Website Speed here are the details below;
Here are some interesting statistics
- Every 1 in 4 people will abandon your website takes more than 4 seconds to the load.
- 46% of users will not revisit the website they had a poor experience on.
- 64% of dissatisfied customers will not shop from the other website.
- A 1-second delay in the webpage loading can decrease customer satisfaction by 16%
Just a few extra seconds will have a considerable impact on visitor engagement and sales.
To increase the website speed, first, know the reasons why your website is slow?
- Unoptimized Images- ensure the image size not more than 1 MB
- The usage of multiple API calls to render JavaScript/jQuery data can result in a significant delay while loading the web pages.
- Although Flash adds interactivity to your website, it also slows down your web page loading speed. Instead, replace it with an HTML5 alternative.
- Messy and undecipherable code
- Display too many advertisements on the website.
Now, if you don’t want to be part of the aforementioned statistics and genuinely want to increase the website speed and performance, check out the tips.
10 Tips to increase website speed
#1 Using a Content Delivery Network
CDN or content delivery networks account for a comprehensive share of delivering content across websites users globally. Here content is in context to the text, scripts, images, software, media files, live streaming media, and on-demand streaming media, etc.
Using a CDN will efficiently improve the website speed, save up to 60% bandwidth, and cuts the website requests to 50%. Other benefits are availability and scalability since they can easily integrate with cloud models, and it can strengthen data integrity and privacy.
#2 Implement a Cache Plug-in
To easily cut the loading speed of a web page is by installing caching plug-ins. Mostly used and free to download are WP Super Cache or WP Total Cache, although developers using WP Engine don’t need it as those have in-built caches.
#3 Choosing a Good Website theme (WordPress)
Three ingredients for increased website speed are a good host, CDN, and website theme/design. When choosing a WordPress theme, you have to balance the visual appeal from a speed and SEO perspective.
There are two ways to choose a WP theme-
- Opt for a WP theme that is fast, light-weight, and one that is built with only the features you need, nothing more. OR
- You can also choose a more feature-rich WordPress theme, which allows you to disable features that aren’t in use.
#4 Compress Images
Another useful plug-in to install if you are using WordPress is WP Smush.it. It automatically compresses your images and reduces the size without compromising the visual quality. Also check backlink building tools
The benefit of the plug-in is that it will keep working every time you upload a new image. Moreover, it works in the background every time you upload a new image. You can run it through all the mages that you have used in the past as well and it will compress them all.
#5 Compress Website
Just like compressing images, you need to compress your website files as well. And the one tool to help you with that is Gzip. It is a simple method for compressing your website’s files that simultaneously saves bandwidth and helps load the website faster. Furthermore, Google and Yahoo use gzip compression. So Gzip your website!
Now, to check the workability. i.e, if Gzip is working properly you can use Gziptest.com.
#6 Fix or Get rid of Broken Links
Adding links, although important, can slow your website speed. From time to time you can check for links that are broken and either fix or get rid of them. If several links are leading to a 404 error page, it can hinder the user’s interest in the website and increase the bounce rate.
Each of the below-mentioned tools will help you dig deeper and help you identify the crawl errors. Cross-check for zero broken links on all three platforms and then you are good to go.
- Google Webmaster Tools (crawl errors tab)
- Frog SEO Spider
- Ahrefs
#7 Minify your CSS and JS files
To begin with, the term minify is programming jargon, that describes the processes of eliminating/ minimizing code & the markup in your web pages and script files. While creating CSS and JavaScript files, developers often use spacing, comments, and well-named variables to make code and markup readable for themselves. This may seem okay at the development stage, but it can be the reason to slow down your website speed. In some cases, minifying can reduce the file size by up to 60%!
There are two ways to minify these files
- By squeezing numerous separate files into one file.
- By deleting white spaces and making files smaller.
If you are using WordPress, using the plug-in WP Minify will automatically perform the task.
#8 Replace PHP with static HTML where possible
HTML is the beginner-friendly markup language and PHP on other hand is the leading back-end language for managing the server-side of websites. Also check task management tools
Although PHP makes the website dynamic and feature-rich, it uses up server resources and consumes too much time. Thus replacing PHP with static HTML will lead to enhanced website speed.
#9 Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks in WordPress
One downside to trackbacks and pingbacks is the number of spam you’ll be swamped with. These also end up blocking your database and use up valuable resources that can be used to provide a good website experience to your visitors.
#10 Disable Image Hotlinking
It is when another website uses your images by linking them directly from your website. Now, it is a practice that can negatively affect your site’s performance. Every time someone views the hot-linked image, it uses the resources to load from your website’s server. This results in slowing down your website also you do not get the credit due for the image.
Conclusion
Maintaining good website speed should be your number one priority. We hope the above tips will be helpful. Check your website speed by using different tools.