How to speed up your website in 2018?
If your website is not optimised and is unable to process images, videos or such other heavy content fast… you lose.
Being even a few milliseconds slow can give you a smaller ROI as well as delayed conversions. In a society that emphasises productivity, we are always trying to get to places faster and faster. From performance updates and same day deliveries, your website too can not afford to slow down in responding to customers demands.
So, here are some of Webplanner's tips and tricks, to help increase your website's speed and performance.
Why speed matters?
"1 sec delay in page response can result in a 7% loss in conversions."
Speed is everything. Customers can be won or lost in fraction of seconds. In just few seconds, you have the chance to display all your USPs, assets and give them reason to stay on your page.
For example: Google exclaimed that it faced 20% of traffic down because of 0.5 seconds delay in the actual loading time.
Amazon reported that its web speed in 2006 improved by 100 milliseconds which helped them earn a 1% increase more of the revenue.
Yes, that's what the power of website speed does for your business. It affects all websites on the internet, even the big boss-Google.
What is a good load time?
Is your site in the 1-3 seconds loading parameter or below it? If yes, perfect!
Website visitors expecting the website to load within 2 seconds, 57% of them will abandon the website that is taking more than 3-4 seconds to load.
But if the average time to load exceeds 5 seconds and crosses 7 seconds, those visitors won't be returning.
To top it all off, Google has even started penalizing those which have slower and undesired speed of their websites… meaning your website rankings will decrease.
How to improve website speed and performance?
1. Go for image resizing and optimization
Let's begin with something simple- compress images!
Image are the most appealing part of your website and customers get impatient having to wait for it to load. Here you can just reduce their image size.
There is several editing software that can help you to make the images internet friendly, helping it in no time. Furthermore, optimize these images by saving them in a web-friendly format and then the site will run without any interruptions.
2. Trim HTTP requests/ redirects
Whenever there is any resource on your website that asks for HTTP/ HTTPS, the speed decreases. That means, the smaller number of requests, the better your website will perform.
Also keep fewer redirects, which otherwise can make another HTTP request.
What can you do?
Just keep the coding clean and ask the Magneto developers to simplify the design. You can do this by: -
Combine multiple images (sprinting)
Create one master file through connecting CSS and Javascript.
Prefer CSS coding instead of uploading many images.
Minify Javascript and style sheets.
3. Take advantage of CDN
Being a professional SEO company in Melbourne, we have found this to be a common issue that due to large geographical distance, audiences face glitches and maximum load time of the web content.
But with Content Delivery Network, all that data can be sorted. This is a geographical server spread globally to help the end-user receive faster and quicker content.
Let's pick a scenario, someone in Australia wants to watch a cooking video by French chef, he has to check his France based business site. It works like this; people who are sitting in Paris can find way too faster his recipes than one sitting in Melbourne or Sydney. The farther the company's data centre is from the user, the slower the content loads and develops the frustrating experience to the viewer.
With CND, you can streamline the process by spreading servers across the globe and cut down the load time for both web and mobile users accessing your site globally.
4. Fix all broken links
Broken links can hamper you in two ways… Firstly it contributes to a bad user experience and secondly, it will affect your SEO.
Use website and SEO analysers to help you go deeper and identify these link errors. From there, you can then redirect or delete the link as required.
5. Cache as much as possible
You must have heard of optimizing caches. This is done to enhance the user's experience.
When a viewer connects to your site, he stores downloadable or heavier files in their browser. Storing these files locally can help your user enjoy as faster load time. Future visits to your site will already have been downloaded on their device and thus contributing to a quicker load time.
6. Take advantage of clear coding
Design your website in a way that requires simple and uncomplicated coding which is easy to find and download.
Or if you want to do it yourself, it can be conveniently done by reducing lines, optimizing database queries, using design patterns and avoiding recursion and repetition.
7. Compress your website with Gzip
The smaller the files, the faster your pages will load.
The Gzip compressor is a file formatting and software application that compresses CSS and HTML files before sending them to the browser. This is a recommended practice to increase load speeds as it can potentially compress a website by 70%.
8. Consider your web hosting
If you have done the things in the above checklist and still the performance seems below average, it's time to review your hosting plans.
Maybe you used a cheaper plan for your budget but when traffic increases the website may freeze unnecessarily and time-out. So, the best option would be to go for a dedicated plan where you can have the sole access to the server and larger distribution space.
Final Words
Content and aesthetics are important, but a slow website won't even help the customer make it there. That's why website performance should always be priority.
In the world where people are expecting to get to places and receive what they want faster and fast, web performance and download speeds need to cater to it too.
As mentioned above, it's crucial to speed up your website game, or you may lose the chances of gaining and retaining your customers. Adopting these ideas may help you by giving an edge to your website's speed and boost SEO.