7 tips for increasing your page loading speed
It has become very hard for online businesses to get customer attention. Even when you manage to get customers to notice your business, you will have very little time to make a first impression. Unfortunately, an unresponsive and slow-loading website could cause users to leave before your pages have even finished loading. On the other hand, a fast-loading website can improve your SEO and give your customers a positive shopping experience. To help you accomplish that, we are going to give you seven tips for increasing your page loading speed.
#1: Remove unnecessary features
When it comes to web design, you can stick to a very simple philosophy that states that ‘less is more.’ Most business owners want to cram in as many features as possible onto their website. Obviously, if you have the right features on your site, that could increase user engagement. However, you should also develop enough discipline to know when to stop. First of all, after a certain point, your website will look overcrowded and it will be hard to find what you are looking for.
Most importantly, too many features or additional widgets and plugins can slow down your website. Think about what you want your pages to do, and only leave the features which help you accomplish that goal. If you want to provide your users with a better browsing experience you can start by removing unnecessary features and increasing your page loading speed.
#2: Clean up the website code
Depending on who did your original website design, it’s quite possible that the code could be filled with bloat. We understand that not everyone has the skills required to build their own website from scratch. Thankfully, you can work with a professional web design company NYC to get a fast and responsive website.
A properly optimized website should have no trouble loading quickly on mobile devices. Realistically speaking, the average user will probably access your website through their phone. This means that it’s even more important to have a fast-loading site. Messy website code is an especially pronounced feature with templated website builders. Although site templates make it significantly easier to build a site, they also leave a bunch of unnecessary formatting and junk code.
#3: Compress media files
Regardless of how optimized your site is, if you fill it with high-resolution images, loading will take forever. Even faster connections can struggle with large media files. Fortunately, there is a simple fix for this situation. You can crop, resize and compress image files to make them significantly smaller.
By doing this, you will be increasing your page loading speed much more than with some other, more complicated techniques. While you are in the process of optimizing your images, New York City SEO expert recommends making a few SEO improvements. Check if all your images have descriptions and alt tags. Also, remove broken links and re-upload missing images. Although these are relatively minor changes, they can have a large impact on your overall SEO.
#4: Change your hosting
It is quite possible that some of the slowdowns on your site are not your fault. Google has useful developer tools which can let you analyze the performance of your page speed. If you realize that your hosting is causing your site to load slowly, there are several things you can attempt. You can see if the hosting provider has a faster package you can upgrade to. However, if that isn’t a possibility you can always change your hosting provider and get a faster service. We definitely recommend testing server speed before you change hosting. It could be that your site speed is being affected by something else altogether.
#5: Have a CDN
Content Delivery Networks are a way to distribute the storage of your files across multiple servers. The servers can be in different locations, allowing users to access your files from the server closest to them. This has the benefit of increasing your page loading speed; however, there are other advantages to having a CDN. If all of your information is hosted on one server and it goes down, your website will be inaccessible. With CDNs, this isn’t the case, since users can always request information from another server. Your data is also safer from DDOS attacks since it is distributed on a large number of servers.
#6: Cache web pages
Caching is the process of copying files into temporary storage. For example, browser caching means that during web sessions, certain data is stored on the user’s side. If those same files are needed again, they can be brought up from the cache memory. This means that the user doesn’t need to send additional requests to your server. Accessing files from the local computer is obviously going to be much faster than downloading them again from the internet. With the proper use of browser cache, you can reduce server load times by up to 80%.
#7: Implement lazy loading for your ads
Lazy loading means that only the visible content on the page is loaded. The rest of the page elements are loaded as users reach those areas of the page. If you lazy load your ads, they will be displayed the moment your users are likely to see them. This can help you get realistic data regarding how many times your ads have been viewed. Experts from top digital marketing agencies NYC pay careful attention to which marketing metrics you use to gauge the effectiveness of your ads. Since lazy loading will only display ads when users are going to see them, your pages will load faster as well.
In summary
How fast your pages load will influence the experience users have on your website. However, the speed of your site can also influence your SEO, and fast-loading sites can bring in more organic traffic. A larger number of site visitors will usually equate to more sales and a better bottom line. As you can see, there are numerous benefits to having an optimized and fast website, and you can use these 7 tips for increasing your page loading speed.
