5 Ways You Can Improve Your Website’s Speed and Why It’s Important
In the digital world, slow websites are unforgivable. Customers are just not willing to wait even a few seconds for a page to load. In fact, 47% of people expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. Even a one-second delay can affect your conversion rate by 7%. This can cause substantial monetary losses. Not to mention all the new customers who visit your site only to bounce quickly due to lag. There are some easy solutions for improving your speed. We have narrowed down five ways you can improve your website’s speed.
1 Image Optimization
With more and more websites relying heavier on images and video, optimizing your images needs to be a priority. Images can contribute to over 60% of a page’s total load time. Saving images that you use for your website as web images will compress the files so that they will load faster for you.
2 Minimize HTTP Requests
80% of your pages response time is spent on the front end, things like loading images, scripts, and flash. Hopefully, you are not using flash on your website anymore. HTTP requests are made for each one of these components. You can use Google’s developers’ tool to see exactly how many HTTP requests are being made on your pages and see if you can reduce or combine some of these. This will directly increase your load time.
3 Server Response Time
Your Domain Name System, DNS is the equivalent of an internet phone book. The DNS keeps a directory of domain names and then will translate them into Internet Protocol, or IP addresses. The faster your DNS server is at looking up an address, the faster your page will begin to load. There are many options for you to check your pages speed. If your DNS is not performing to standard, then you might want to consider switching.
4 Browsing Caching
Browser caching is the temporary storing of files on your computer for websites that you have visited. Enabling your browser cache is a great way to help speed up pages load times. When you have return visitors to your site, the page will load quickly because it will not have to send HTTP requests again, which we know slows download times.
5 Content Delivery Network
A CDN can work with the server that hosts your site to help maintain fast load times during high traffic times. Using just one server means that every request is sent to that server, which during busy times will mean slower response rate that affects the load times. Even if traffic isn’t a concern for you, you may want to consider the distance from your server. This can also impact the server’s ability to maintain fast load times.
Improving your pages overall performance is a must to stay relevant in an ever-changing digital space. Having fast load times is essential but driving traffic to your site is critical also. Using a top SEO consultant can help you achieve your website and business goals.
