First impression is the last impression. And if the first impression of your website is like a slow walking turtle then it will not be a good thing for your business. One thing that is very important for any business or brand is to have a good looking and fast loading website. If your website has the looks but not the speed then you might lose many potential customers. If you’re website loading speed in not good then you need to enhance the loading speed of website. So it is necessary to ensure that the loading speed of your website is fast enough to keep your visitors stay put on your website.
Websites which loads fast have more traffic and visits and hence they have lower bounce rate. All these factors help them improve their rankings. According to a survey, a user waits for just 3 to 4 seconds before your website opens. If it takes longer than that then the user will not think twice before hitting that back button. So, now you know the importance of the loading speed of your website.
If you are facing low traffic and high bounce rate on your website then most probably loading speed of the site is to blame. By making sure that the loading speed of your site is good you can generate more organic traffic on your website which will ultimately help you in lowering the bounce rate of your website. So if you are looking to reduce the loading speed of your website then bear with me till the very end of this article where I will be informing you people about some tips and tricks that you can apply to enhance the loading speed of your website.
Why website speed matters?
How does the loading speed of your website affects the success of your site. Let’s take a look at the factors that tells us the importance of a good loading speed of a site.
➨ Conversion rate of your website
Conversion rate is the percentage of people that visits your website and leaves after actually buying a product. In other words they do what you want them to do that is, to buy your products. It is definitely an important factor for a business performance.
For example, if they visit your site, subscribe to the newsletter, buy your product or service, and download your content. All these things affects the performance of your website and hence the success of your business. So website that loads faster will have higher conversion rates in comparison to websites that loads slowly.
Related article: 8 effective methods to enhance conversion rate of your website
➨ Visibility of your website
A fast loading website will be easily visible to the audience and they can find your site that way. Google also gives priority to this factor when it ranks websites. Slow loading websites will give poor user experience and due to which it will be less visible in the search results.
➨ Usability of your website
A well performing website will always have a loyal audience. Usability of your site like the loading speed, responsiveness of the site affects the loyalty of the customers directly. If your website usability is not up to the mark then you will not have a loyal audience base.
7 Methods to enhance loading speed of your website
Now that you are aware of the importance of the loading speed of website, let’s see the seven tips you can use to enhance the loading speed of your website
1. Employ a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network is a set of web servers that are distributed across various geographical regions that provide web content to end users with respect to that region. When you are hosting a website on a single server then all the requests are sent to the same hardware. This puts load on the server and it takes time to process every requests due to which the loading speed of the site increases.
Especially those users that are far away from the region of server they face speed issues more. With the help of CDN, web requests are sent to the nearest web server which results in the quick processing of the request and hence the website loads faster. Though this method is quite expensive, but it is an efficient method.
2. Optimize the size of images
Images are an important part of a website. Especially for e-commerce websites it is very necessary to upload images of the products that you are offering to the customers. But if those image files are large in size then that might lower down the loading speed of the website. So, optimize your images accordingly so that your website loads faster. You can use different tools to resize images without compromising the image quality.
3. Limit the number of plugins
Plugs are basic elements of a website. They add particular features that are suggested by third party websites. But if more plugins are installed then the resources that will be needed to run them will be more. As a result of which the website loads slowly. Some plugins are installed but they are not used that often.
So remove all the unnecessary plugins. Run performance tests on your page to figure out which plugins are slowing down the website. The speed depends on the quality of the plugins as well. So make sure that the plugins installed on your website are of high quality. Only keep the essential plugins and keep them up to date.
4. Limit the number of Java files and CSS
When a visitor tries to access a specific file, a HTTP request is created. So, if your websites have a large number of Java files and CSS files, then these HTTP requests will be more in number which will be dealt individually by the visitor’s browser and which slows down the website. So in order to speed up the website you need to limit the number of Java and CSS files. Because by doing that the number of HTTP requests will be reduced.
5. Annoying ‘404 errors’
It is the most irritating and annoying thing we face on the internet. A 404 error means the page is not found. This message is shown by the host to the browser or search engine when a request is made to access a page that no longer exists. This can negatively affect your website performance.
You can use several error detection tools in order to correct them. You can assess the traffic that these pages generate and if they are generating a good traffic then you can put external links in those pages so that the visitors don’t leave your platform. In the meantime you can try to fix the errors.
6. Reduce the number of redirects
Website redirects creates HTTP requests that will increase the load and can affect the speed of the website negatively. So try to keep the number of redirects to minimum number or eliminating them would be even better.
7. Don’t overuse web fonts
Web fonts have become much famous in website designing. But opposite to your expectations, they can have a negative impact on the speed of your website. This is because web fonts create extra HTTP requests to external resources. You can take some measure to reduce the web fonts like
- Use modern format for modern browsers
- Use needed styles only
- Only use those characters sets that are used on the website.
Conclusion
To conclude I would say that website speed plays a huge role in the overall performance of the website. This affects the bounce rate and eventually the ranking of the website. And having a good website speed is a basic necessity to provide good web services to the users. Because on average, user expects your website to loads within 3 seconds. So follow these tips to speed up your website.
