It’s probable that you’re losing out on potential customers and visitors if your website loads slowly and takes a while to view and use. When a website loads slowly, users become frustrated and leave. These days, the majority of people dislike waiting for web sites to load. They need the information yesterday, they’re in a rush, and every second matters.
Studies have shown that 40% of users will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. That is a significant number of missing prospective clients! In addition, Google disagrees of slow page loading times because they detract from the user experience. Google is less inclined to move your site up the ranks the more times users rebound off a page.
Choose Your Host Carefully
Probably the most important aspect to consider when looking for a hosting provider is making sure your website loads quickly and is easy to use. Many people believe that cost is the only aspect that matters, yet this shouldn’t be your first priority. Although a cheap web host would save you money, poor service and poorly loading sites could lose you money too.
Seek out a hosting company that can flexibly grow the resource requirements of your website on the fly, or that offers packages and services large enough to meet your needs. Selecting a hosting provider becomes even more crucial if your website is intended for users in a certain city or nation. This is because you can choose a host that is nearest to your target market to improve the speed at which users receive it.
Use a Content Delivery Network
Using a combination of caching and geographic closeness to provide the fastest download speeds to your website visitors, a content delivery network, or CDN, is a service that depends on a robust network of geographically diverse servers to serve the majority of your website to users. It has been demonstrated that using a content delivery network can significantly improve the speed at which your website loads, especially for those who live far from your web host.
Optimise All Your Images
The photos that load each time a visitor accesses your website probably consume the most bandwidth. Although utilising a content delivery network can be helpful, optimizing your photos for the web will have a greater impact. To do this, you can either save your assets in a more web-friendly file format or lower the resolution and image quality of your files, which will reduce their size and speed up loading times.
Plugins for picture optimization greatly simplify this process. Once the plugin is installed, photos will automatically resize without sacrificing quality. The fastest way to fix your photographs is to use a plugin if your website has a lot of images, like an e-commerce site.
If WordPress is not your CMS, you still have other options.
Limit the Use of External Scripts
External scripts are necessary for your website to load; they are scripts that are hosted somewhere other than on the server that hosts your website. Social media share and comment buttons and external comment systems like Disqus are great options in this situation. When feasible, reduce these and switch to locally hosted programs; ideally, get rid of them completely.
Remember that maintaining a healthy website is essential to improving user performance, and hosting is a crucial component of website upkeep.
Minimise HTTP Requests
Your browser must send a fresh request to your web server for every single thing that is linked from your main website. Reducing the number of these requests will speed up how quickly the website renders and displays for visitors by reducing the amount of work that your server and the visitor’s browser must perform to serve the page. Combining files, like JavaScript and CSS sheets, is one way to accomplish this. Minifying CSS and JavaScript is another popular strategy that aims to reuse as much of the code as you can and eliminate as many characters and whitespaces as possible.
Get Rid of Plugins You Don’t Need
Lastly, since unnecessary plugins bog down your site, delete them. It’s probably that several plugins have capabilities that are similar to one another.
You’ll probably experience higher conversions and longer website visits from users if your website operates more quickly and effectively. A substantial amount of time should be spent in making sure your website loads as quickly as feasible.
