Improve Your Page Load Speed
Websites have become an essential aspect of every modern business operation. Without websites, businesses have no effective means of driving sales, attracting customers, or delivering content. In other words, without a website, there are no ways to successfully run your business online. Now, in order to satisfy your customers, your website must work exceptionally.
One of the most important factors that influence customer experience and satisfaction is website speed. Slow and sluggish websites are best at driving customers away. As a matter of fact, 47% of online consumers expect for your pages to load in less than two seconds, while 67% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Simply put, your website needs to be fast, in order to make your customers happy. Here’s how to improve your website’s speed.
Reduce the size of your images
Image quality plays a vital role in delivering a pleasing visual experience for your website’s visitors. However, high-quality images can oftentimes slow down your page load time, due to their size. In essence, the better the quality of an image, the larger the size of it, and thus it takes more time for your website to display it properly. That’s why it’s important to reduce image size and optimize it properly.
You can start by using the right image files, such as PNG, JPEG, or GIF. Also, you can either select the right image size before you upload them or compress them once you do. In addition, make sure you eliminate unnecessary image resources, such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files. The better your images are optimized, the less time it will take to display them properly, which ultimately improves your website’s speed.
Minify the code
Each and every website has many extra and unnecessary files that can greatly slow down its load time. Getting rid of such files can improve your overall website speed. The simplest way to achieve this is through the minification process. Minification gets rid of unnecessary files that reside in the code itself, but without interfering with how the code executes in the end.
In other words, minification won’t affect how the browsers process your website resources, but it will remove any redundant data, such as block delimiters, white space characters and so on, that slows your pages down. Your code will become shorter and a lot easier to execute. You need to focus on minifying JavaScript, HTML and CSS resources. Furthermore, if you have difficulties improving your website speed on your own, you can always enlist the services of an agency specializing in website development in Sydney, which can help you accomplish this much more easily.
Include a content delivery network (CDN)
Having a CDN can greatly improve your website speed and page load time. CDN is a network of servers placed around the globe that helps deliver your content to various users. The way it works is that it catches your web content, such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript resources in order to make your content more available and more easily accessible. Without a CDN, every website visitor would have to send a request directly to your main server or your hosting provider.
Depending on the traffic and volume of these requests, your server would eventually overload, which can slow it down or even crash it. However, when utilizing a CDN, website visitors are redirected to the server that’s closest to their location that has your content made available. That way, the number of requests to your main server goes down and your website speed improves.
Leverage browser caching
Every time a user accesses your website via a browser, the browser must download all your web files in order to display them properly. Again, these are CSS, JavaScript and HTML files. The main issue is the size of these files. The larger these files are, the more time it takes for them to load properly. This can be quite long on slow Internet speeds, such as on mobile devices.
Moreover, the more files you have, the slower your speed is, because every file makes an individual request, thus overloading your server. By enabling browser caching, your website tells the browsers to store the downloaded files. That way, each time the user re-visits your website, their browser won’t have to download files again, because it already has them stored and available. That means that the page load time will be much faster.
Website speed is crucial for ensuring a seamless browsing experience and user satisfaction. It’s not always easy improving your website speed, but it’s extremely important if you want to deliver value to your website visitors and improve your website’s overall performance, as well as its efficiency.
Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a co-author of several technology websites and a regular contributor to Technivorz.
Fivenson Studios: Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our award-winning team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers. Your advertising message needs to be expressed in a way that captures the imagination and attention of your customers. That’s where we come in. We’re not just a team of designers; we’re strategists, thinkers, and makers, with a passion for solving problems by understanding people. We create experiences that people love by recognizing customers’ needs and desires, as well as the trends and technology that affect them. For over 10 years, we’ve been honing our practice, making sure that every strategic graphic design solution we provide to our clients advances their business and drives their brand awareness.
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