‘The first impression is the last impression.’ We all have heard this statement, and the same applies when we talk about a website. You might not believe it, but the speed of your site has a massive impact on your business. It can be surprising for you, but around 40% of visitors prefer to leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, about 47% of users expect that your site must load entirely in less than 2 seconds.
Pretty shocking, right? But that’s the truth. Your website loading speed can have a profound impression on both your customers and your business conversions. A slow website leads to more bounce rate and can damage your business reputation. Therefore, it becomes highly crucial to know how to increase website speed. When your site loads faster, you attract more traffic, which increases the chances of getting qualified leads that might convert into customers. This article will help you learn five critical tips to optimize your website speed and reduce its loading time.
But why is it essential to optimize your website speed?
Before understanding the importance of improving your site’s loading speed, let’s first discuss what we know by page load time. So, page load time is a metric measuring how much time your website needs to load your web page’s contents. It means, if your page load time is high, the user will face a delay in getting the contents of the requested page. As a result, the bounce rate will increase, and users will abandon your website without looking into it.
Now, there are a few key factors that influence the success of any website. Let’s see how to
website speed optimization affects them. Here are the primary factors we are talking about:
- Visibility
- Usability
- Conversion
Let’s discuss all of them one by one.
Visibility
Do you know that how fast your website loads can directly impact the visibility of your website? If not, let’s understand how. The visibility of a website means how easily visitors can find you on the internet. Search engines like Google check for your website performance and, based on it, ranks your website. Google does not promote websites that perform poorly and have a slow response time, and as a result, the visibility of such websites becomes low.
So, how to make your website visible to your users?
Well, since December 2017, Google has changed its algorithm for ranking websites on the search pages. According to the updated policy, Google started giving ranking based on the mobile user experience. It means that the more the mobile user experience of a site, the more the chances to get better search page positions. This algorithm was known as Mobile-first Index, and it influences even desktop searches. It forced the webmasters to understand how to improve the website loading time on mobile devices too.
Usability
When a website performs well, users who visit it frequently become its loyal customers. As a result, they use the website often and even recommend it to others. It can lead to an increase in traffic and can further create chances of leads and sales. In fact, Google promotes sites that constantly provide the users with better performance and respond quickly to the user requests.
Conversions
Okay, if your website loads slowly, this might hurt you, but slow websites ruin conversions. For the facts, 79% of customers would hardly return to a site with a poor loading speed. Moreover, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to open up, you can lose almost half of your customers even before they reach your site.
When you are running a business and expecting website conversions, like purchasing products, registering to your portal, subscribing to the newsletters, etc., you need visitors. Therefore, make sure your site loads faster so that users get impressed by its performance and think about initiating an action.
Make your website faster: 5 easy hacks to get hold of
Image optimization on your website
Visual graphics catch more attention than plain text. A website containing high-quality pictures makes your website more interactive and engaging. However, the negative part is that these images can be large in size, making your web page load slower than usual.
Therefore, to make sure that your site loads faster even with these eye-catching images, you can optimize them using several tools like Kraken, ImageOptim, etc. You can also manually change the image settings by changing the size attributes of the pictures according to the user display properties.
Minimize the excessive JavaScript and CSS files to Increase Website Speed
You know, every time a user comes to your site, a new HTTP request gets generated into the site console. When these requests exceed a specific amount, they can slow down your website.
To prevent this from happening, you need to minify the JSS and CSS resources to reduce the file size. As a result, it will boost your site speed by reducing the data requested by the webserver.
Apply GZip Compression
GZip compression is one of the efficient ways to decrease file sizes. It compresses the files before sharing them to the browsers, due to which their size reduces. The users get the compressed files in a zipped form, which they can later unzip to view the contents.
The best thing about GZip compression is that it works with all the files on your website. You can use this method on your website by enabling a utility called Gzip.
Reduce redirects
If your websites have excessive redirects, it will increase the HTTP requests that can escalate users’ waiting time. As a result, your website performance will degrade. To overcome this, make sure your main page of the website does not contain unnecessary redirects. In fact, try to include as few redirects as possible in your entire website. For this, you need to scan your website and check out all the redirects available on your site. You can perform a site scan using a tool named Screaming Frog. After the scanning process completes, you can verify what redirects are not serving any essential purpose and remove them to boost your web page loading time.
Decrease the server response time
Do you know, your website loading time also depends on the time taken by your DNS (Domain Name System) lookup to respond? Wait, do you know what a DNS is? Well, a DNS is a server consisting of a database with IP addresses and some hostnames. When a user visits a website by entering a URL, a DNS server tends to convert that URL into an IP address that signifies its position online. This process of searching for a specific DNS record is known as DNS lookup.
Therefore, when a visitor enters your website’s URL, it depends on your DNS server how quickly it searches for the IP address associated with your site to redirect the visitor to it. Hence, switching to a faster DNS provider will answer the ‘How to increase website speed?’ query.
Wrapping Up
So, now you can imagine even a delay of one second in your website loading time can cause a lot of damage to your business reputation. Therefore, it becomes pretty crucial to understand and apply the tips mentioned above to enhance your website speed. For this, you can also hire full-stack developers who can assist you to increase website speed. Their expertise in the field can optimize your website to increase its visibility and improve business conversions.
Also Read: Advantages of Laravel
