5 Strategies That Will Help You Improve Your Website Speed

In today’s fast-paced digital world, website speed is vital for your business success and your user experience. Users have higher expectations and decreased patience. According to many pieces of research, users will wait up to 3 seconds for your site to load, meaning that slow loading speeds can lead them to your competitors. As a result, you’ll face fewer sales and less page traffic.

Also, website speed plays a significant role in search engine rankings. More precisely, Google prioritizes fast sites that provide an excellent user experience. Therefore, it’s crucial to offer fast loading times.

But if you wonder how to do that, you just need to check out the five most efficient strategies we’ve selected. So, let’s start!

Use a Reliable Web Hosting Provider

Web hosts are essential for website speed as they provide storage, power, and connectivity for your website to perform in the best way possible. Therefore, the quality and the capacity of the web host directly impact your website’s loading times.

By purchasing a reliable web host, you will get high-quality hardware and software, processors, SSDs, and stable network connections that will significantly decrease your site’s latency and prevent it from being unresponsive and sluggish.

However, keep in mind that there are different hosting types. You should usually start with affordable shared hosting, and as your business grows and needs more resources, move to VPS, then dedicated and cloud hosting. To make the best decision, we recommend visiting this link and choosing the best web host with a suitable hosting plan.

Utilize a CDN

Once your website is available online, customers from all around the world can access it. Unfortunately, they may face slower loading times due to the distance from the server that hosts the website and their location.

However, a CDN can help you overcome this issue. The CDN is a distributed network of servers that stores and shares static website elements, such as images, videos, and CSS, globally. It reduces the distance between your visitors and the server by duplicating and storing these files on several servers worldwide.

For example, suppose a server in the US hosts your server. In that case, the CDN will deliver the static elements of your website to a server that is physically closer to your potential customers, decreasing the time it takes for the content to reach their browsers.

Employ Caching

When more visitors access your website at once, servers might slow down and take longer to load your site to them. Fortunately, caching can help you solve this issue. Caching is the process of storing data in temporary storage so that your data will be presented faster with future requests. In other words, the website won’t need to load over and over again for each user, meaning it will use fewer resources and get better loading times.

However, there is a different approach to caching, depending on the platform the website relies on. For example, if you built your website by using WordPress, you can implement plugins like W3 Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. Unfortunately, most shared servers don’t enable caching. But that’s why VPS and dedicated servers allow you to activate it by accessing your web host provider’s settings.

Optimize Your Website’s Images

High-quality images are eye-catching, but they can cause significant issues with your site’s speed and, therefore, decrease your page traffic. However, there are a few ways that can assist you in reducing image size without affecting its quality.

First, you should use the JPEG or PNG format and avoid BMP and TIFF. Next, you can crop unnecessary elements from the image and resize it to fit your website. In addition, you can utilize tools like JPEGmini or ImageOptim.

Another method is to implement HTML responsive image attributes (<secret> and >size>) and adjust the image size according to the display properties. Lastly, if you use WordPress for building your website, you can use a plugin like Imagify that will optimize the images.

Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

Nowadays, JavaScript and CSS are crucial for your website performance, as they control your site’s layout, formatting, and presentation. But they are complex files that can cause slow loading times. That’s why you should minimize them.

You can achieve that by removing comments, line breaks, spaces, and block delimiters in the code. As a result, the code becomes lighter and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. You can also combine CSS files together and also do that with JavaScript ones.

However, if you don’t have coding expertise, you can always use tools like Closure Compiler or choose a caching or CDN tool with built-in minify features. If your supporting platform is WordPress, you can make this process even easier. You can choose a plugin like WP Super Minify that will help you get better speed rates in no time.

Final Thoughts

Enhancing your website speed can be a challenging task, especially with the fast advancement of technology. However, it is crucial to establish a fast site as it has a positive impact on your customers and your business. Nonetheless, we recommend you follow these five essential tips we’ve provided and see how your speed boosts.

by Web Desk via Digital Information World