8 Steps to Speed Up Your Website and Improve Conversion in 2022
Page speed is a critical factor in digital marketing today. Unfortunately, most websites perform poorly when it comes to page speed, and that has a direct negative impact on their revenue. If you want keep visitors on your site, increase conversions, rank well in search engines, and keep visitors happy, you need to provide a great experience in terms of website speed.
It has a significant impact on:
1. How long visitors stay on your site.
2. How many of them convert into paying customer.
3. How much you pay on a CPC basis in paid search.
Website speed has a huge impact on
user experience, SEO, and conversion rates. Improving website performance is
essential for drawing traffic to a website and keeping site visitors engaged.
Here we review steps you can take in order to make a website faster:
Steps to Speed Up Your Website
1. Skip the budget web hosting
Sure, your website will be available
most of the time as it would with most any web host, but it will load so bloody
slowly that your visitors will leave frustrated without ever converting into
buyers.
But everyone else only wants to get in
and get out of your website as quickly as possible. People want to be on your
site for just long enough to do what they came to do, whether that means to get
an answer, buy a product, or some other specific objective. If you slow them
down even a little bit, they will be likely to hate their experience and leave
without converting
How quickly (or slowly) your website
loads also has an impact on organic search ranking and pay-per-click costs. In
other words, if your website loads slowly, you should expect your competitors
who have invested in this critical area to eat your lunch.
There are a lot of web hosts that are
optimized for speed, particularly for WordPress websites, and some of them are
priced similarly to the budget options. So ask around, do some testing, and
invest in a web host that will give you the performance to satisfy both your
visitors and Google.
2. Reduce HTTP Calls
Every file needed for a webpage to
render and function, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts require a
separate HTTP request. The more requests made, the slower that page will load.
Most themes load one or more CSS files
and several JavaScript files. Some, such as Jquery or FontAwesome, are usually
loaded remotely from another server, which dramatically increases the time it
takes a page to load. This becomes even more problematic when you consider the
additional CSS and JavaScript files added by plugins. It’s easy to end up with
half a dozen or more HTTP requests just from CSS and JavaScript files alone.
Use below steps to Reduce HTTP Calls
- Merge JavaScript
files into one file.
- Merge CSS files
into one file.
- Reduce or
eliminate plugins that load their own JavaScript and/ or CSS files.
- In some cases, as
with Gravity Forms, you have the option to disable them from being loaded.
- Use sprites for
frequently used images.
- Use a font like
FontAwesome or Ionic Icons instead of image files wherever possible because
then only one file needs to be loaded.
3. Include the Trailing Slash
Omitting the
trailing slash on links pointing to your website, whether from external sources
(link building efforts) or from within your own website, has an adverse impact
on speed.
When you visit a URL without the trailing slash, the web server will look for a file with that name. If it doesn’t find a file with that name, it will then treat it as a directory and look for the default file in that directory. In other words, by omitting the trailing slash, you’re forcing the server to execute an unnecessary 301 redirect. While it may seem instantaneous to you, it does take slightly longer, and as we’ve already established, every little bit adds up.
4. Enable Compression
Enabling GZIP compression can
significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to download your HTML, CSS,
JavaScript files because they are downloaded as much smaller compressed files,
which are then decompressed once they get to the browser.
5. Enable Browser Caching
With browser caching enabled, the
elements of a webpage are stored in your visitors’ browser so the next time
they visit your site, or when they visit another page, their browser can load
the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server for any of
the cached elements.
Once the first page has been loaded and its
elements are stored in the user’s cache, only new elements need to be
downloaded on subsequent pages. This can drastically reduce the number of files
that need to be downloaded during a typical browsing session.
6. Minify Resources
Minifying your CSS and JavaScript
files removes unnecessary white space and comments to reduce the file size, and
as a result, the time it takes to download them. There are several tools
available online to convert a file into a smaller, minified version of itself.
There are also several plugins
available for WordPress that will replace the links in your website head for
your regular CSS and JavaScript files with a minified version of them without
modifying your original files, including popular caching plugins such as:
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- WP Rocket
It may take a bit of effort to get the
settings just right because minification can often break CSS and JavaScript, so
once you’ve minified everything, be sure to test your website thoroughly.
7. Optimize Media Files
Optimizing the media files on your
website has the potential to improve your page speed tremendously, and doing so
is relatively easy, so it’s a good investment of your time.
Optimizing Images
- Opt for the ideal format.
- Ensure images are properly sized.
- Compress the image file.
Optimizing Video
- Choose the ideal format. MP4 is best in most
cases because it produces the smallest file size.
- Serve the optimal size (dimensions) based on visitors’ screen size. Eliminate the audio track if the video is used in the background as a design element.
- Compress the video file.
- Reduce the video length.
8. Utilize Caching & CDNs
Caching enables your web server to
store a static copy of your webpages so they can be delivered more quickly to a
visitor’s browser, while a CDN allows those copies to be distributed to servers
all over the world so that a visitor’s browser can download them from the
server closest to their location. This improves page speed dramatically.
if you want to maintain (or improve)
your rankings and visibility, it’s essential to know how to reduce loading time
of website. You must have a site that provides a quick, easy user experience.
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