Many website owners build a website dedicated to their businesses. It’s a clever move; there are various benefits to having some online presence. A website means a wider reach, good publicity, and more potential customers.
To be precise, a website that performs well gets you all those advantages. That’s why, regardless of whether you use it for promotional purposes or to sell products, your website needs to work perfectly.
Website speed plays a big role here. If your website is slow, the users who find your business online won’t be impressed. It might even drive away those who find out about it in real life and go online in search of information.
To illustrate, here are the speed stats from various surveys that are highlighted in the infographic below:
- Websites that take over 3 seconds to load lose 53% of visitors.
- Each second of loading delay decreases page views by 11% and customer satisfaction by 16%.
- You lose 7% of conversions for each second of loading delay.
As you can see, a slow website is much less effective at promoting your business and is downright awful for selling products.
That’s why we’ve brought you a few simple things you can do to keep website speed in check. Do this and you’ll bring customers in instead of driving them away.
Image optimization is first. By web page standards, images are insanely large files. If not optimized properly, they can make web pages heavier and much harder to send. Proper image optimization can sometimes shorten load times by 70%. That’s why it’s important to implement proper image optimization, especially if you run an online store or any other image-heavy website.
GZIP is a useful tool to have in your arsenal. GZIP uses a simple system that works extremely well. It uses the redundancies in website code to compress it and make it easier to send. This can easily reduce the amount of data you have to send to the user by <a href=”https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-speed-affects-website/”>75% or more</a>.
Even though GZIP technology is over 25 years old, it’s a must-have for all websites today. Implementing it requires tinkering with your site’s code, though, so we recommend doing a backup of your site before trying anything.
Server-side caching is another useful way to reduce the load and response times of your website. It helps the server deliver static content much faster if a web page gets multiple views. That way, if numerous visitors request to see the same web page, they get the results much faster.
Picking a quality content delivery network can be useful if you have a wider audience. CND’s usually let you use a variety of servers in different geographical locations. This makes it easier to serve content to users who are physically far from your origin server. This resolves any latency issues. Moreover, if your origin server gets heavy traffic spikes, the other servers in a CDN can help out and prevent any unnecessary delay.
Combine these techniques with fast website hosting for the best results. Quality web hosting is extremely important for website speed. If your hosting provider doesn’t give you enough server resources, it is much harder to do anything about slow load times. That’s why it pays off to research the numerous hosting options available and choose the best one for you.
Finally, if you don’t know where to start, you can use GTMetrix or any other speed testing tool to see where your website is sub-optimal.
There are numerous ways to test and improve website speed. However, the ones we’ve listed here are the most important and generally easiest to implement. Follow this list and your business will benefit from your fast website.