How to Increase My Website Speed

Have you ever come across a website which loads slow? We have all experienced clicking on a website which takes a while to load! What would you do when facing such a website? The majority of users will leave instantly and look for another website in the search results. This is what we call the importance of website speed! 

The website loading speed is directly correlated with user experience. The faster your website loads, the better UX you will have for your website and consequently the higher rank your website will have. You can read “Is your website speed an important factor?” to find out more. Website speed optimisation is part of the SEO Services & Web Design in general.

Here in this article, we will provide you with solutions through which you can optimise your website speed.

What is website speed?

The total time it takes for your website or web pages to be loaded completely once a user clicks on your website URL is called website speed. Statistics show that the perfect timing would be 1 to 3 seconds at the longest, as users are not tolerant enough to wait more than 3 seconds. Therefore, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to be loaded completely, you must do something right away!

How to speed up my website?

There are a number of factors that influence the speed of websites. Below, we will take you through the most important ones and provide you with appropriate solutions to get the best result.

• Photos Optimisation

It is interesting to know that photos are responsible for a large portion of internet traffic! Even though images are quite helpful for improving your website appearance and your content quality, they can reduce your website speed as they are larger than HTML and CSS files in size! The solution is to compress your images by reducing their dimensions, resolution and changing the file format. There are many powerful tools on the internet such as WP Smush, tinypng and Attrock that you can utilise to optimise your images, though it’s always a better idea to work with a professional web design team to get the best result possible.

• Coding Improvement

You need to go through your website’s coding and remove anything that is unnecessary for the coding to be carried out by computer. This includes all comments, spaces, semicolons, characters and other unnecessary items. In the coding world, this is called minifying CSS, JavaScript and HTML codes. This will decrease the file sizes which will lead to the page loads faster.

• Coding from Scratch

In some cases, such as improving an old website speed, coding improvement will not work for an old website. The solution here is to code the website from scratch. In this case a professional and experienced team will be needed to get this important project done for you.

• Choose a High Quality Hosting Service Provider

There are many hosting service providers out there who offer low cost services. You need to avoid these tempting offers, as most of the time the quality of services of such service providers is poor. We’d highly recommend consulting with experienced web design professionals, in order to make the right decision for your website hosting service. This would considerably affect your website speed.

• USE a CDN ( Content Delivery Network)

CDN increases the website speed by caching your website content in multiple locations around the globe. This would increase your website speed as the request goes to a close-by CDN server, rather than goes back to your hosting service which might be thousands of miles away. You need to keep in mind that using CDN will significantly improve loading time of your website.

• Enable Browser Caching

The content on your website will be stored on the visitors’ browser by enabling the browser caching. Therefore, in case of a user coming back to your website, the stored content will be shown from the user’s browser and it is not needed to be downloaded again from your website. Browser caching will speed up your website significantly, for returning users.

• Lazy Load Images

Users are mainly after content, rather than images and videos. However, when a visitor comes across your website, the whole content along with images start to be loaded. In order to speed things up, you can use lazy load images and videos. By using them, when a user enters your website, only the content will be displayed, which is obviously quicker than images and videos. Then, once the user starts to scroll through the page, the images and videos start to be loaded. This will speed up the website and improve the user experience. 

• Reduce redirects as much as possible

Even though redirects are needed to be in place in some cases like moving your host, having too many redirects on your website will dramatically damage your website’s speed. Therefore, keep the redirects on your website as little as possible. You may work with Redirect Mapper Tool to identify unnecessary redirects on your website or alternatively work with a professional web design team to get the best result possible.

• Cache your web pages

It is the most effective thing to do in order to increase your website speed. By doing so, a copy of your files will be stored that will minimise the amount of work needed for your server in order to display your webpage to a user’s browser. There are many ways to cache your webpage, such as using W3 Total Cache, which is a free WordPress plugin. We would highly recommend you work with an experienced web design firm, as there are other ways to cache your web pages which might suit you better.

• No Templates and Themes

Using template and theme will prolong your website loading time. There are many features associated with templates and themes that most of them will not be used in your website. However these useless features will cause your website to be loaded much slower. That’s why we always recommend designing your website from scratch by working with a professional web design company.

There are many other ways to speed up your website that can be applied, depending on your website. You can read “Web Design Procedure” and “Web Design Pricing” to find out more. In case you intend to work with a talented team to enhance your website speed, you may contact us directly and we are more than happy to help through our free consultation meeting.