How to Increase Website Speed
Would you like to know how to increase website speed? Do you know what it involves? Read on to learn everything that you need to know on the subject.
53 percent of mobile website visitors abandon a webpage that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. This figure underlines just how critical website speed is for today’s users.
The average website load time on a 4G connection is 14 seconds, which means that you can stay ahead of the competition by drastically bringing that time down. Top performing websites have learned this trick, with all websites on the first page of Google taking just 1.65 seconds on average to load.
But high search ranking isn’t the only thing you gain when you increase website speed. You also get more page views, higher customer satisfaction, improved conversion rates, and greater revenue.
If you’d like to achieve faster website speed but don’t know where to start, you’ve come to the right place. Here are easy website speed tips to get you started.
Do Website Speed Tests
Conducting website speed tests is one of the best ways to gauge the performance of your website. They can help you track web performance downgrades and improvements.
A thorough speed test can help reveal what’s slowing your website down so you can know where to conduct improvements.
Currently, there are many top-quality tools you can use to measure website performance. There are even reputable sites that will allow you to test your website for free and get a detailed breakdown of how much time individual elements of a web page take to load.
The information you get serves as a good starting point for increasing website speed.
Choose a Good Hosting Provider
Generally, the server you use plays a massive part in how fast your web pages load. But since you can’t build your own servers, you’ll most likely need to rent server space from a web hosting provider.
Choosing the right hosting provider can make a difference in your website speeds. There are different types of hosting from which you can choose, including:
Shared Hosting
This type of hosting entails many websites sharing the same resources of the hosting service. You’ll be sharing the same RAM, CPU power, and so on.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A VPS is similar to shared hosting, except for the fact that there are much fewer sites sharing the same machine. Everyone also gets dedicated processing resources which they will never exceed.
Dedicated Web Hosting
As the name suggests, dedicated web hosting offers you your own server. You get total control over the server’s setup, hardware, and so on.
As you can expect, dedicated web hosting requires technical skills to manage. Of course, you can still hire a professional to do the job for you.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is by far the fastest-growing hosting option today. This type of hosting uses the pay-as-you-use model, meaning you can access the amount of power you need.
Managed Hosting
Managed web hosting is particularly available for WordPress websites. Typically, the hosting provider takes care of things related to hosting, including performance, security, and performance. The many benefits of managed WordPress hosting make it very popular among website owners.
As you start, you can choose low-cost shared web hosting. However, you need to keep upgrading as your needs grow to ensure that your website doesn’t slow down.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network boosts the speed of a website by caching content in various locations around the world. Typically, CDN caching servers are found closer to the end-users than the web host or origin server is.
When you request content, the request goes to the CDN server close to you instead of going all the way to the hosting server. The hosting server may be located several thousand miles away and across numerous autonomous networks from you. When you use a CDN, there’s a dramatic decrease in load times.
Optimize Images
Images make up a significant percentage of web content. Generally, they take longer than text to load on a website because they’re usually larger than CSS and HTML files.
One of the best ways to decrease the load times is to optimize the images. You can do so by compressing the image files, reducing their dimensions, and minimizing their resolution.
The good news is that there’s a host of tools you can use to optimize images and increase website speed.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Browsers are usually required to make many HTTP requests for different assets on a webpage, such as scripts, CSS files, and images. Some pages require the browser to make dozens of such requests.
Every request the browser makes means a round trip to the server that hosts the resource and back. The more requests there are, the longer the load time for a webpage. Besides, an issue with a single provider can impact the entire webpage’s ability to load fast or even at all.
The best solution here is to try to keep the number of assets a page needs to load at a minimum. It also helps to conduct speed tests to find out which of your HTTP requests are taking long. This way, you can find a faster hosting solution for these requests.
Increase Website Speed to Enhance User Experience
The amount of time your website takes to load can have a huge effect on the overall user experience and, ultimately, your conversion rates. That’s why you should always be looking for ways to increase website speed. In doing so, you get to draw more traffic to your site and keep your visitors engaged.
Are you interested in high-performance, secure, and affordable WordPress web hosting services? Contact us today and learn how we can help.
