When businesses look into creating a website, they usually prioritise its content and design. Although these two aspects are critical, other criteria are just as fundamental.
Website speed and how it can affect your business
Slow website loading speeds can have a huge negative effect on your website and how it performs. Below are a few ways a slow website can affect your business:
- Reduction in website traffic, resulting in loss of sales
- An increase of user’s bounce rate (exiting your website)
- Reduction in user engagement due to poor user experience
- Negative effects on your SEO and SERP rankings which will result in less organic traffic
How to increase website speed
Although it is best practice to integrate measures into your website that reduce loading times before developing, this doesn’t mean a slow website can’t be optimised later on. Below are 5 tips on how to increase your website’s speed and create a better experience for your users.
Note: You can use Google’s page speed tool to see how fast your website is.
1. Reduce Image Size
Images can make up a huge portion of your website in terms of memory size. So reducing the amount of memory that images take up and giving images specific sizes on your pages can greatly improve your website speed.
There are a number of ways you can decrease the size of images:
- Use a free online compression tool to compress your images without loss of quality, before uploading them to your website
- Use a plugin to compress the images that are already present on your website
- Resize your images using an image editor, so that they are reduced to the size that they will be presented on your web page
2. Minimise or Reduce CSS and Javascript
By combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single file, you can significantly minimise the number of HTTP requests made. Reducing the number of HTTP requests is crucial for improving website loading times. This approach not only reduces the overall file size but also enhances the website’s performance. Visitors will then experience faster load times and a more seamless browsing experience.
3. Enable Lazy Loading
Lazy Loading is a feature on websites that only loads images on the page as and when they are in view of the user. This means that instead of loading an entire page with all of its images, the browser only has to load a portion of the page at a time, making it a lot faster.
On most website platforms there are several free plugins, guides, or scripts that can help add lazy loading functionality to your website:
4. Website Hosting
Believe it or not, where you host your website can affect its speed. If you try to load a website that is hosted on a server in another country it will take longer to load than a website hosted close to you.
Many hosting providers have physical servers located across the world, which makes it more convenient for you and your users. Some hosting providers even let you choose what location to host your website in. So if your business and your target audience are all located in the UK, you can select your server location to be in London, as an example.
5. Website Caching
When a large number of users access a webpage simultaneously, servers can become sluggish and require more time to deliver the content to each user.
Website caching will address this issue by storing the current version of your website on the hosting server and serving this version until the website is updated. This process ensures that the web page does not need to be rendered repeatedly for each user.
As a result, the server’s load time is reduced, and the delivery time of the web page is improved. This leads to a more efficient and faster user experience for all visitors.
Do you need help increasing your website speed?
If you would like assistance in optimising your website to increase its speed and improve your online user experience, please get in touch:
