Does The Speed of Your Website Really Matter?
7 easy things you can do now to make your website faster
Why is website speed so important? Well, slow loading times can lead to a bad user experience, bad search engine rankings (or no ranking at all) and worse if all losing prospects/visitors.
For all those reasons, you should focus on making your website faster and the best part is that doing so is not hard at all.
Here are 7 easy things you can do right now to increase the speed of your website.
1. Install a caching plugin
Many of us run websites that require interaction with a database ie. WordPress, and every time someone visits the site, it hits your database to get content. Installing a caching plugin can reduce the number of times you hit your database by serving cached versions of pages from the file system or memory.
This means that if 10 people visit your website, the caching plugin will only hit your database once instead of 10 times.
2. Optimize your images
Large images can take a long time to load, so make sure you’re optimizing them for the web. You can do this by compressing them using a tool like Photoshop or ImageOptim, and by using the correct file format.
For images that you plan to use on the web, you should save them as JPEGs or PNGs.
3. Minimize HTTP requests
Every time someone visits your website, their browser makes a request for each individual file it needs to display the page. This includes the HTML document, images, video, scripts, stylesheets, and any other asset you have on your page.
The more requests there are, the longer it takes for your page to load. You can reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one file, or by adding embeds instead of including an image in every post.
4. Gzip compression
Web browsers can understand compressed files much better than uncompressed ones, so it’s a good idea to compress your website’s files before sending them to the browser.
This can be done using a tool like Gzip, and it will reduce the size of your files by up to 70%.
5. Use a content delivery network
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that are located around the world. When someone visits your website, their browser will request the files from the server that is closest to them. Many hosting services offer some sort of CDN, that’s why it’s so important to choose the right host for your site.
A CDN can speed up the loading time for your site by up to 50%.
6. Use a responsive design
Most people nowadays view websites on their phones and tablets, so it’s important to make sure your website looks good on all devices.
Using a responsive design will ensure that your website looks good no matter what device it’s being viewed on.
7. Enable caching
If you’re not using a caching plugin, you should enable caching in WordPress. This way, when you make a change to your site, it will be cached for a certain period of time. Every time someone visits your website, they’ll get the older version until the cache expires and is refreshed.
In conclusion, there are several things you can do to make your website faster. following the tips listed above will help you achieve a faster loading time for your site. There are many plugins for WordPress out there that will help you with this task even if you’re not the “techy” type!
Do you have any other tips to share? Let us know in the comments below! Want us to help? Click here so we can connect!