Why does website loading speed matters?
The loading speed of a website is one of the most important aspects in determining how popular and well-ranked a website would be by search engines. Google is the industry giant when it comes to search engines and it’s paramount that your website is given a good rank by google’s page ranking algorithm. A good page rank means your website would come up higher in search results, driving more traffic to your site and thus letting it reach a wider audience and making it more popular. Also, a slow load of the website would cause the loss of potential customers.
So is it possible to speed up your website? Yes! Following a few guided practices laid down by SEO experts can reduce your website load speed by as much as 3 times and increase customer retentivity to your website by the same scale! Web design constitutes about 80% potential for improvement of load speed. The rest 20% depends on your web hosting and is just as important as web design since a bad host can ruin all your efforts made for improving load speed. Often the best-made websites are entirely suppressed by bad shared hosting.
What is shared hosting?
In shared hosting users share the resources of a computer server like RAM Memory, hard disk space, internet bandwidth, processor performance, and so on. This hosting is most commonly used because it’s the cheapest and meets basic needs. But imagine that you share a server with a website that offers downloading music and has a large number of visitors, where many visitors download music at the same time. This will make your website easy to “suppress” which means significantly extending the load time of your website! Since we know already how important website speed is, we’ll learn some new techniques for daily work on the server settings to improve our website speed.
Believe it or not:
- Users have patience for just 1-2 seconds when they load the site. If your site takes more time than that then you’ll see many users simply moving away to another website.
- Over 50% of all sites are slow – slow opening of pages as a result of bad code, large and non-optimized MySQL database, as well as the slow response of the hosting server.
So webmasters please take note.
These are the 10 steps you should perform to increase the load speed of your website.
1. Make sure your code is clean
Neat code is not just pleasing to the eye of the developer. It helps pages to load faster. Reducing file sizes, especially connected with the front end can give a great effect. Even simple things like unwanted spaces, line breaks, and redundant tags can damage the page load speed.
Javascript – it’s cool. Using Javascript you can add to your website not only fun things but also can extend the usability of the website. Often Javascript can be quite redundant to the landing page. The same applies to Ajax.
Remember the “KISS” principle – Keep it simple stupid. When you direct attention to simplicity, you don’t need to spend energy on all sorts of additional tweaks.
But if you desperately need your important scripts, then, as soon as possible, download content that is “above the fold», and then only the rest. This can be done with the Google tool – “Remove render-blocking JavaScript”
Determine how and in which order your scripts should be loaded and then work on the results of the optimization.
2. Buy a better hosting
If you want to monetize and earn from your website, and you still haven’t succeeded in doing that then the main problem would be the cheap hosting deal you have taken on a shared resource hosting, which means that you share server resources with a lot of other websites, that have a negative impact on you.
Search the internet to find a better solution, because good web hosting is never too expensive. Veeble offers a lot of great hosting options and our server space is maintained SEO friendly and great for boosting page rank. So buying from Veeble will benefit you automatically in better website speed and rank.
3. Reduce redirects to a minimum
301 redirects – this is the standard practice of SEO, to show the search engines and viewers that a certain page has been moved to another URL. This is a standard practice used when sites and pages have evolved over time. 301 – redirecting can help to avoid the non-existent pages and error 404.
The problem is that redirecting can negatively affect speed. Google recommends minimizing redirects or abandoning them because they lead to additional transfers over the network. This can be a problem on mobile devices.
The main thing here – it’s digging deeper. Which redirects are happening to you? What are their goals? If you see a large number of temporary 302 redirects, you can try to clean it, to increase its speed.
4. Minimize HTML and CSS
This action should ensure your page gets maximum efficiency.
If you are unsure of your technical skills, or you’re in doubt, just go to Google PageSpeed Insights, enter your URL and send the results to the developer you trust.
5. Try to use a minimum of WordPress plugins (or other CMS)
Open the WordPress console and see how many you have installed plug-ins accumulated over the years. Surely there will be something that you don’t use anymore, or something that you have set to try, but were not satisfied with the result, but the plugin still running.
Perhaps you can give up on some plugins, and replace them with a professional code of your developer instead of some installments from unknown authors.
Collecting a whole bunch of solutions, written by different authors for different tasks, and placing it all into one site, will make it look like some kind of freaks.
If you want to perform a quick diagnosis of your website on WordPress, you’ll not like the solution, but you have to install another plugin to measure the performance of plug-ins and their influence on page loads, then you will be able to make the right decision, which to keep and which to throw out.
6. Take the advantage of a GZIP compression
GZIP compression uses when there is a need to minimize requests to the server from your browser. Simply, GZIP can reduce file sizes to speed up page loads.
Using GIDNetwork, you’ll be able to see how things go with the compression on your site, and also to get advice if there is anything that can be improved.
7. Use the appropriate picture size
If you ask a browser to resize your original picture from 1200 to 600 pixels and customize it to fit the screen size of all devices, the requested page will cause a bunch of extra traffic, and processor capacity will be overloaded. This is especially true for mobile devices, which don’t have a powerful processor or stable internet connection, and the size of the screen is rarely bigger than a little notebook.
Use the size of pictures that will fit perfectly – possibly different versions of images for different devices. If this seems too difficult, at least use the built-in resampling means of images, which have the majority of the CMS, for example, the same as WordPress.
8. Compress pictures
Don’t think that it’s just your problem. According to some reports, almost half of the best e-commerce websites don’t use compression of images.
However, the compression of images is maybe the simplest action, which can yield quick results in terms of page load speeds. There are many free tools, which will help to significantly reduce the size of images.
9. Get the image through CDN
To resort to the use of online content distribution (CDN) is how to get help from other servers which are close to visitors of your website. CDN delivers content from the closest server and thus reduces page load time.
CDN doesn’t have to be external. There are services that can transmit the entire website through the CDN, realizing all the benefits of the geographical proximity of the site to users without changing the website code.
10. Try to settle scripts to a new place
Maybe it’s surprising for you, but the script placement may have an influence on page load. It means that when the tracking scripts are at the top of your page, the browser will need to download it first, and only then show content to the visitor, for which he, in fact, came to the site. Another problem is duplicate scripts ( a common mistake when several people are working on a page at the same time) will also slow down page loading.
So to recap, to improve your website load speed work on your web design, and for superior hosting just select a top-notch web hosting provider like Veeble and get all your hosting needs taken care of. Feel free to ask us questions in the comments below.