4 Useful Tips for Speeding Up Your Website

Why should you think about speeding up your website? Did you know that every second extra that your site takes to load costs you an 11% loss in page views and 7% fewer conversion rates?

A website that takes too long to load costs the owners dearly. It irritates the website visitors, and as a result, your website will be visited less and less by prospective clients. Think of it this way, whenever you order food, you are in a hurry to eat. It irritates you if it takes longer to arrive.

Website visitors online are also looking for quick, bite-sized information. They will not wait for your website to load if it takes longer. So, no matter how accurate your content is or how alluring images are on your website, if the very first step to reach your website isn’t short, drop off rates will be soaring high. You can use the services of a website designing company for better results.

How to measure loading time?

There are two different metrics to decide the page load time. TTTB and page load time are two methods, with the help of which people usually decide TTTB refers to the time taken by a website to send its first byte from your server, after submitting an HTTP request to it. TTFB gives some idea about how long it might take to load a website, but it still does not give complete information. Brands are usually concerned about how long will it take for the full website to load rather than the time taken to receive the first byte.

However, an extremely high TTFB score also means bad news. If the very first byte of your website takes longer to reach, imagine how long the complete website will take?

On the other hand, the page load time concerns website users more, and anything above 3 seconds is too much. Another study reveals 75% of users will not revisit a page that takes more than 4 seconds to load. There are plenty of software available online that not only tell you website loading time but also various bottlenecks causing the delay. Once you have realised your website is taking too long, and identified the bottlenecks.

Here are a few actions you could take to speeding up your website

1. GZIP Compression

Unzipped files can be a load on the browser. This is because downloading a 100KB file gets heavy. You can unburden your browser by compressing your files before passing them on. Your webserver cannot trim the files as it pleases. Therefore, if a file is pushed down its throat, nothing will load on the screen.

The visitor who is waiting for your website to load, will probably never return to your website and click on the “back” button. Your best choice in such a situation is to use a website compressor that popular browsers can read with ease. GZIP can do that. GZIP compressed content is supported by most web browsers, and it can significantly reduce the size of your HTML or CSS files. GZIP compression is essential for speeding up your website.

2. Compress Images

39% of visitors say that they leave a site if it takes too long to load. You cannot compress images on the website by GZIP. But, compressing those images is a must. Page images seriously impact the loading time and in order to have accurate speed optimisation, compressing images is a must.

Deleting too many pictures can be an option, but not so if you are an e-commerce website. According to a report, about 66% of shoppers accepted that they need to see at least three pictures before buying a product. Well clicked pictures are definitely a huge determinant for sales.

The planned course of action here should be to find a tool that determines how important are images to your webpage. These tools can also help you find images, if any, are creating problems in loading. You can either compress them or remove them completely. Compressing images is essential for speeding up your website.

3. Remove useless plugins

Whenever a WordPress website is requested by users, it usually goes through the database for information. Processing these queries takes ample time and resources. More plug-ins usually require the browser to process more information and queries. This makes the processor work hard and at times, delay loading. Plugins can also bloat the database and thereby lead to increased load time.

Your best course of action should be to delete all the unnecessary plug-ins. A WordPress website anyway has free plugins, you can install them whenever you wish to. You can also use the services of a web design company to remove plugins better. Removing useless plugins is essential for speeding up your website.

4. Use a good host

Server response time is ideally different from one host to another. Therefore, in order to have an optimised loading time of your website, you need to have the right host. This is essential for speeding up your website.

Without a decent host for your website, you won’t get many benefits from the tips mentioned in this article.

A slow host can prevent your website from loading within the golden time of three seconds. When choosing a host, it is advisable to look for more reviews online, get proper data and then decide for yourself.

These are a few sure-to-work strategies which can reduce website loading time. Try these and never let speed prevent you from loading within the magic three seconds. For expert assistance, Techmagnate, a web design company in Mumbai, can help you optimise your website to increase conversions.

Watch this space for updates in the Hacks category on Running Wolf’s Rant.

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