Improve user experience with increased page and site speed.
When you have a website, you need to find ways to ensure that users enjoy coming to visit it. One of the ways to ensure visitors have a great user experience is through improving site performance, specifically the loading time. People who come to visit your site are either truly interested in the products or services you are offering, or they might be seeking some more information about those products or services. However, if they find that your website is extremely slow in loading, they will not hesitate to go to the next website that offers similar information.
If you don’t want to lose your share of online traffic to your competitors–or to the back button– then it’s time you paid attention to this key aspect of your website. It may seem small, but it will make a huge difference in helping you increase the volume of traffic to your website. Here are five tips to make your website load fast and perform better.
1. Try Google’s PageSpeed Insights
Already have a slow website? Well, then you would first need to find out which aspects of your website need to be fixed. Google Developers have released an amazing new tool for this purpose called PageSpeed Insights. This tool checks every aspect of your website and helps you locate exactly what is slowing down your website.
What’s more, it shows you how your website performs on both desktops as well as mobile devices. All you have to do is enter your website’s URL and hit the analyze button. After a few seconds, PageSpeed Insight will show you which areas of your site need to be fixed so that you can enhance its performance.
2. Optimize website images
You may not know it, but your images have a lot to do with your website’s load speed. However, you can’t design a website without including images on it at the same time. So what you can do is optimize all of the images, to ensure that your website will load faster. Optimizing images is a simple process as all you would need to do is either reduce the file size or reduce the size of the original image.
Big image files take more time to load on the website, thereby slowing it down more. So if needed, you can reduce the image quality–but not too much–to just enough, so that it does not interfere with the load speed of your website pages.
3. Embed videos from external sources
Having videos on your website is definitely trending as they help visitors to stay engaged on your site for a longer time. Then again, having a lot of videos on your website might slow it down altogether. However, if you feel that some videos might be important to your website visitors or if you want to share some useful and educational information about your products or services, then you can always host those videos on another video-sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo.
After you upload your videos on these sites, you can embed the video links directly into your website. So now, if your website users are interested in viewing those videos, the video will play within your website but will be streaming from your preferred the video-sharing site, where the video content is housed.
4. Make small website pages
Even a single slow loading page of your website might be the cause of your entire website loading slowly. When you include a large amount of content onto a single page of your website, then it might naturally take more time to load once any website user wants to view that page.
To fix this, you should consider splitting up the large pages of your website into two smaller pages so that the pages load faster and no content that you want to share with your visitors gets omitted. However, you have to ensure that both the pages have sufficient amount of content on them as required by Google.
5. Use CloudFlare
A service such as CloudFare can help to optimize the delivery of your website, ensuring your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance possible. CloudFare guarantees that every page on your website will load as fast and as efficiently as possible, regardless of the device the visitor is surfing from. This type of service offloads the work of your server through a caching service that will make your site super fast.
How do YOU make your website load fast?
These were just five easy ways to make your website load fast on any web browser. Also, remember to avoid adding any extra, unnecessary features to your website that serve no purpose, but just make your website run slower.
Do you know any other ways of making your website load fast? Well, then feel free to mention them in the comments.
