Everyone knows that a website needs to be quick to serve web pages to your audience or they would lose patience and leave.

Website performance has a direct correlation with revenue impact.

Source: VWO

Website speed doesn’t impact only your audience that has already landed on your website. It affects your search rankings. Website speed is something that Google takes into account while listing search results.

When your visitor bounces off your website immediately after landing on it, Google sees it as an irrelevant result and starts to list the page lower down in search results.

Isn’t it unfortunate to lose search rankings just because of this?

Initially, your website might have loaded quickly. But over time, it starts slowing down and no one notices until someone highlights it. It gets fixed and in time, it slows down again.

This becomes a vicious cycle.

Website speed depends on your hardware, your Content Management System, page sizes, image sizes, script sizes, interactivity components, server calls made, and a ton of other factors.

It is also good to remember that website optimization is an ongoing process and you need to make sure that speed is not affected every time you make changes to your web pages.

So what does one do?

Here Are 15 Very Do-Able Recommendations To Speed Up Your Website.

1. Compress your files – To reduce the size of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes, use a file compression software application such as Gzip. The smaller the size of files, the faster they will load.
2. Minify and combine files – Being important files, combine CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files to optimize the site appearance. Use minification tools such as HTMLminifier to minify HTML, CSSNano for CSS, and Uglify for JavaScript.
3. Reduce redirects –Each time redirects, you might face the problem of waiting for additional time for the completion of the HTTP request-response cycle. To avoid this, reduce the number of redirections that happen on your website.
4. Removing render-blocking JavaScript – If the browser that you use encounters render-blocking script during the process, it has to block it and continue executing.
5. Leveraging browser caching – Browsers hide or cache visitor information such as style sheets, images, JavaScript files, and others, so that, every time you visit the site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page again.
6. Using a Content Distribution Network (CDN) – Copies of the sites are stored at multiple data centers so that you can have faster access to the site, which is possible using the CDN.
7. Optimizing the images – Make sure that you have images in the right file format and size. They should be compressed well so you don’t have to wait for the loading of multiple images.
8. Choose the right hosting option -Initially, you might choose the cheapest host, but, once the site starts getting traffic, it is necessary to upgrade it. Anyhow, you may have to choose the host which is reliable and trustworthy.
9. Include the trailing slash – Omit the trailing slash on links that point to the website, as they have an adverse effect on the speed of the site.
10. Use page speed optimization services – Use page speed optimization services such as WebFX to boost up the load time of the page.
11. Run a constriction audit – It is in your best interest to get the files as small as they can get, without sacrificing the quality of images. Use the GID Network to run the constriction audit and you can see how it will speed up the site.
12. Use external hosting platforms -Along with hosting website files on CDN, use an external hosting platform for some of the larger files.
13. Optimize the CSS delivery – The style requirement of your site is held by CSS. So, avoid including CSS in HTML code. Instead, put all the CSS in an external stylesheet for a cleaner code.
14. Prioritize above-the-fold content – Improve the visitor experience by having the above the fold i.e. top of the page section content load faster. This is called lazy loading and helps the pages with a lot of content below the fold i.e. bottom of the page section content.
15. Reduce the number of plugins you use in your site – Use only those plugins that can help to improve the site, add custom functionality, make the code cleaner and neater, improve visitor experience, and much more.

These are just some of the ways you can speed up your page load times. And it brings with it, significant benefits.

Google takes into account the speed at which a website loads when it lists search results. The quicker the page loads, the higher the ranking. Quick loading websites offer a much better experience to users – site speed influences the way users view your site and gives them a much better browsing experience when the pages load faster. This leads to higher conversion rates.

To know more about this and for more hints like this, take a look at this detailed article on creating a strong digital presence for your brand.

Tell us how you are dealing with page load speeds. We would love to hear. You can write to us at marketingfolks@xerago.com.