The speed of your business website is crucial for business success. How fast your page loads will highly determine page views, conversions, user experience, search rankings, profits, and many more. The average load time for websites that rank on the first page of Google is 1.65 seconds, which is the goal to shoot for if your target is to have your website ranking there. A manual or automated speed test will give you an insight into how fast your site is currently.
Research shows that 40% of consumers are likely to abandon any page that takes more than three seconds to load. Of those that remain, 79% are less likely to return to a site with a slow load time. Many factors influence the load time of your website, and in this article, we look at practices that can help improve your site speed.
Choose a Suitable Web Host
One of the most critical decisions in website hosting is choosing an excellent web hosting provider. Every web host has its unique features, plans, and technologies, which generally affect the website’s load time. Consider the hosting type that the host offers, as the main features like hard drive, bandwidth, and RAM automatically affect your site’s page load time and performance.
It is important to go for a hosting provider whose data center location is close to where most of your audience is, as the further the server, the more the response latency.
Reduce Aesthetic Details
Aesthetic details will make your website attractive. Unfortunately, these usually slow your load time, keeping visitors from coming back to the site as much as you would want to. In business, a faster website is preferable to overall appearance.
Optimize Images
Optimize all images on your page to improve the load speed. The first step is ensuring they are of the right size and format, as oversized images cause your web page to load slowly. To optimize images, crop them to appropriate sizes, reduce their color depths to low levels, use JPEG format as the first option for photographs, and PNEG for graphics.
Use CSS sprites for template creation of images like icons and buttons frequently used on the site saving users on load time. Compress images in programs like Photoshop instead of zipping them.
Use Fewer Redirects
Redirects increase the number of steps to the loading process. Each redirect adds extra time before the user can get to the desired location. Use fewer redirects on your site by changing the internal links to the destination URL for a faster page load time. Remove commas, spaces, formatting, unused code, and code comments on your code to increase page speed.
Leverage Browser Caching
Enable the browser caching feature on your site so strategic information like JavaScript files, stylesheets, images that you rarely change can be stored on the visitor’s device. That way, when visitors come back to your site, the browser doesn’t reload the whole site from scratch, saving them on load time. You can set the expiration date for your cache under the “expires” header, with one year being a reasonable period.
Endnote
Speed up your website to boost your SEO ranking, improve user experience, increase sales and profitability while protecting your paid search investments. We believe you will find these tips useful for your business purposes.
