8 Tips for Improving Your Website Speed

The speed of your business’ website is critical to your success. If your site is slow, potential leads and current customers aren’t going to sit around and wait for it to load. According to Kissmetrics, nearly half of all Web users expect websites to load within two seconds, and will abandon these sites if they’re not loaded after three. Additionally, 79 percent of people who shop on the Web wouldn’t buy from a company a second time if its site didn’t perform well. A slow site is going to negatively affect your Google rankings, as well. That means fewer leads with reduced organic search traffic. If you want to improve the speed of your company’s site, take the following tips into consideration. 1. Identify Speed Issues The initial step is to determine how fast your site is and what problems are behind slow loading times. To figure this out, simply log onto Google’s PageSpeed Insights and type in your Web address. You’ll receive an evaluation for the mobile and desktop versions of your website that’ll include helpful suggestions. [caption id="attachment_51605" align="aligncenter" width="429"] Google PageSpeed Insights will reveal if your website is loading slow, and how to fix it.[/caption] Google will tell you exactly how you can improve your site’s loading time and what will result after you fix your issues. Once you know what steps to take, you can start to put what you learned into action. 2. Tweak Your Images Large images may be causing your page to load slowly. Don’t upload big images and graphics if it’s not necessary. While photographs can be in JPG format, design elements that contain less than 16 colors can be saved as PNGs. Don’t fall into the trap of forcing the browser to arbitrarily resize images, as this means the same large image will still be delivered but only resized upon load. You should already use Web-optimized images in the first place. 3. Eliminate Any Unnecessary Plugins and Add-ons Many businesses today are using do-it-yourself website building solutions. This saves them time and money, and allows them to have a site up and running in minutes. However, this can also lead to performance issues. On sites that use free themes, the coding might not be professional, and it could be slowing you down due to unnecessary scripts and add-ons. Go through your site and delete any plugins and add-ons that are not necessary using. Though it’s going to cost a lot to hire a Web developer, it’s better to go for a professional than lose customers because of a page that’s lacking in terms of design and performance. 4. Minify Javascript, CSS and HTML Code Developers will write a lot of superfluous information into their coding, but the Web server and browser will only read the essentials. This extra code needs to be removed from your scripts in order to reduce size and improve loading speed. If you don’t have a developer on hand, you can use a minifying service on your Web host or hire an independent company to take care of it. 5. Replace Your YouTube Code Do you embed YouTube videos onto your website? If so, they’re slowing you down. This is because the page has to download CSS, images, and Javascript resources in order to load the videos. The files download to your site even if the visitor doesn’t click on the videos. Instead of embedding, copy and paste the following code from Digital Inspiration, which will play your videos on demand. Simply replace the video ID within the code and you’ll be good to go. [caption id="attachment_51606" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Instead of embedding the long YouTube code, copy and paste this code from Digital Inspiration, which will play your videos on demand.[/caption] 6. Forget the Fancy Home Page Are you using Flash or a bunch of different widgets on your homepage? How about a ton of share buttons and lengthy blog posts? Your home page is most likely where visitors are going to land first when they first access your site. Keep it as simple as possible, and don’t go overboard with text, images and plugins. 7. Use Compression If your site is full of videos, text, images, buttons and widgets, it’s going to involve large file sizes. Make sure you use gzip, which zips your files instead of sending them to index.html. The result is smaller files and faster loading times. You can find the code for gzipping here, or you can simply inquire about it with your Web developer. Most of these tweaks can be addressed by deploying your website on a capable server and using a content management software that is already optimized for performance. Furthermore, according to Incapsula’s CDN guide, many of the above-mentioned fixes can already be addressed by using a capable content delivery network. Along with localizing cached content delivery through a global network of servers, a CDN can provide image optimization, code minification and file compression – these can significantly reduce page load times. If you use all these tips and tricks, your page will load quickly. You’ll be able to draw in more customers and keep current customers happy, thus increasing your conversions for your company.

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8 Tips for Improving Your Website Speed

Kylie Ora Lobell

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Kylie Ora Lobell