Nothing frustrates a visitor more than a slow loading website. We’re living in a digital world where having a website has become a necessity for every business and individual who are looking for anything. Users have become quite restless and intolerant, they can’t stand a website that will take more than 5 seconds to load. They’ll end up leaving the site which will increase the bounce rate. At the same time, Google even prefers websites that have fast loading time and it will rank those websites in the search engine.
A website should not take up to more than five to six seconds to load. Any website taking more than that will lose a visitor forever and sales. The speed of your website matters a lot especially when it’s an e-commerce website. Having a slow website will bring a negative impact to the website resulting in:
- Low conversion rate
- Bounce rate will increase
- Sales reduction
- The business will lose its image and credibility
In this article, we have prepared a guide on how you can speed up your website with the help of these tips.
Table of Contents
Enable browser caching
Browser caching allows the visitors to store browser copies of your site so the next time they visit your site they don’t have to reinstall it. When the visitor will return to your site in the future, the content will come up without reloading the entire page. This saves time and loads the web page faster.
Optimize image size
Oversized images take time to load the webpage. Images should be of a specific length so that they don’t take much time to load. Crop the images to a size where it doesn’t lose its visibility and quality. When the images on your website are not optimized, which means they are large in size. They tend to take up more space and loading time. When you’re optimizing your images, make sure you use CSS sprites. You can also run it collectively on all the images uploaded to your image library.
Also Read: 7 Website Design Trends To Use In 2018
Get rid of unnecessary plugins
The web owners get tempted to add plug-ins more than they need. They might not know that each plugin added can slow down the website. Before adding plug-ins it should be noted whether there’s a need or not. Note that it’s not important about how many plug-ins your website has, in fact, it’s about the quality. A website with 30 plugins can load faster than the one having 10 plugins. Plugins do help improve the website speed but you need to value quality over quantity.
Enable Gzip compression
Gzip compression basically minimizes the size of the browser based on HTTP resources. Gzip automatically reduces your website files into zip files, reducing the image size while increasing the web page load time.
Minify JavaScript and CSS files
If your website has loads of JavaScript and CSS files, there’s a high chance your website will be having many requests and your website will be telling you how to treat these files. This will eventually bring a wrong impact on your website speed. Minifying JavaScript and CSS files will improve your site speed in an effective manner.
Website loading speed matters a lot at the end of the day. These are some of the tips that should be implemented if you want to improve the page load time of your website. Having a fast loading website has become necessary nowadays. People expect websites to load in a blink of an eye or you will risk losing a visitor or sales. These tips are very effective to boost your website speed.
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