6 Simple Ways to Improve Website Speed
Improve your website speed is one of the best things you can do from both a user experience and SEO perspective. Both Google’s bots and your real customers look kindly upon a fast, seamless website. In fact, the search engine themselves suggests that the probability of a customer bouncing from your website (leaving without interacting) increases 32 percent as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. That’s a lot of potential customers you’re missing out on.
Whether you’re building a new website from scratch or working with a team that provides web development in Melbourne to make improvements to your existing online presence, aside from using tools to check website’s response time, here are 10 simple ways to improve your website speed.
Choose the right hosting provider
All websites need a hosting provider — they manage the servers where all your information is stored. There are plenty of hosting providers out there but not all are created equal.
Avoid choosing a cheap hosting provider. While you’ll be cutting upfront costs, you’ll likely be paying for it in the long run. Hosting providers that offer cheaper services are usually overloading their servers, increasing your website speed and ultimately decreasing the number of visitors who will be able to access your website.
Be CMS-smart
These days, the top CMS platforms offer much the same experience in terms of website speed. Whether you’re working with Kentico or Drupal, as long as you go with one of the top, established providers, you will be making a smart choice.
However, there are decisions your web development services team can make within your CMS that will affect the speed of your website. Take plugins, for example. They’re commonly used to add features to a website and further customise the user experience. However, too many plugins — or the wrong kind (eg. from third party sites that don’t care for security or performance) — and your website speed will suffer.
Enable caching
Visitors are probably going to visit your site a few times before making the decision to contact you or complete a purchase. While they might be patient enough to wait the couple of seconds it takes for your website to load the first time, over several visits, those seconds can start to add up.
Enter caching. The process of caching involves storing copies of your site’s files so that your website does not need to send a request to the server and wait for a response every time a visitor returns to your site. Images and information will load quickly, allowing your future customers to efficiently access the services they need.
Compress and optimise images
Images and graphics are what makes your website unique. In fact, when asked what visual elements they value on a company’s website, 40 percent of surveyed individuals replied images.
However, images aren’t always good news. In fact, they can add significant strain to your server and negatively affect website performance. There are a number of strategies you can use to circumvent this issue.
To start with, ensure that your images are in the correct format. JPEG is usually recommended for standard photos. Secondly, compress your images using a proper tool that won’t sacrifice quality for speed.
Consider, too, what value images and videos are adding to your website. While they’re certainly important, many visitors will prefer a website with fewer images that loads quickly than one loaded with impressive graphic elements that is completely inaccessible.
Create crystal-clear code
Your customers might not be able to see it, but how well your code is written can have a significant impact on website speed. By engaging in a practice known as ‘minifying,’ you can help reduce bandwidth usage and increase the accessibility of your site.
Minifying involves reducing and removing comments, spaces, and line breaks in your code. Stylistically, code formatted with these features can help others in a web development services team understand the back-end of a website. However, when it’s up and running, they are no longer necessary.
Some CMS platforms even offer plugins that will do the job of minimisation for you.
Reduce your redirects
Even after your website is launched, you are likely to be adding and removing pages. Each time you remove a page, you will need to set-up a redirect, to prevent visitors from arriving at a dead-end.
Redirects are very handy in this way, but too many can significantly increase page load time. Only use redirects where appropriate and ensure your sitemap is set up in an appropriate manner.
There are plenty of other small strategies you can use to improve your website speed. Some might only cut a few tenths of a second off load time, but there’s no doubt that it all adds up in the long-run. For more information, speak to a team that provides web development in Melbourne today.