Do customers leave your website within the first few seconds of landing the page? Ever wonder if it’s because you need the loading of your website faster?
Visitors do not like websites that take a long time to load. The only way to solve this problem is to make your website faster.
But before that, you need to run a test on Google PageSpeed Insights to find out whether loading speed is creating this problem or there is something else.
A study shows that almost 40% of the users leave a page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. So, it’s really important to improve your website’s speed. It doesn’t only help with improving the bounce rate but it also boosts the customer satisfaction.
Get a Fast Web Hosting
Getting a fast web hosting is one of the best ways to make your website faster. You’d probably not have to make any changes if it works. But you need to figure out whether your current hosting provider is offering a better loading speed or not. You may take help from the reviews of users that are using the same hosting service for a long time.
Based on our experience, Kinsta, SiteGround, and WP Engine are some of the best hosting services known for offering excellent loading speed. Although their hosting plans are a bit expensive, they can provide a better experience to your clients.
Use a Lightweight Theme
There is a 90% chance that you’ve built your website using a content management system like WordPress or Wix. The beauty of these platforms is that they offer tons of amazing themes you can use for your website.
But it sometimes appears as a problem when you end up choosing a bulky theme for your site. It can be hard to figure out whether your selected theme is lightweight or not. But you can use Pingdom Tools on your live website to evaluate the performance of the theme.
If your theme has a lower score, you need to change it as soon as possible. We won’t recommend making changes to the current theme as it will lead you to a huge mess instead of solving the problem. Therefore, you must explore the theme gallery to find a lightweight theme that can make your website faster.
If you’re a WordPress user, we recommend Using Neve, Zakra, Hestia, or Sydney for better website speed.
Eliminate or Reduce the Size of HTTP requests
Sometimes, a huge number of HTTP requests reduce the loading speed of your website. If you want to eliminate or reduce these requests, you must have a clear understanding of what they actually mean. HTTP requests are basically the sets of requests your computer makes when it’s trying to access a file from the webserver.
You need to analyze the exact number of HTTP requests for each page of your website. Fortunately, you can get it done with Pingdom by running Website Speed Test. You can click on the requests to find the biggest culprits. Later on, you can either eliminate or remove them to make your website faster.
Minify and Combine Files
Now, this can be one of the most useful ways to make your website faster. But you’d need the services of a web designer because you’re going to make changes to HTML, CSS, and JAVASCRIPT files.
Without any doubt, it has become a lot easier to build a website with a template website builder. But the problem with these website builders is that they reduce your website’s speed by creating messy code. You need to minify these files to make the code smooth and easy to understand.
Make sure that you get rid of indentation, line breaks, and extra spaces because they increase the size of your page. Now, you need to combine all the CSS and JavaScript files so they may take less time to load.
Get Rid of Unnecessary Plugins
Adding too many plugins to your website can also reduce your website’s speed to an extent.
Nowadays, we have a huge number of plugins available for free. So, we never think twice while adding these plugins to our website. But these plugins can drastically reduce your website’s speed over time. So, you must immediately remove the unnecessary plugins from your website. And don’t forget to eliminate the old and outdated ones because they’re also reducing your website’s loading speed.
Optimize your Images
We admit the fact that images are really important for user engagement. But it’s also worth knowing that images play a significant role in reducing your website’s speed.
So, you need to take this aspect into consideration if you want to make your website faster. We aren’t asking you to remove images from the website as it will make your website look boring. However, there are some other ways you can use to solve this problem.
For instance, you can compress the images before adding them to the site. Similarly, you can use the standard web resolution size for all images on your website. We guarantee you that it will significantly improve your website’s speed without even reducing the user-engagement.
Move Scripts to Footer
We understand that script files improve the overall functionality of your website. But you must agree that the script files don’t need to load immediately after a person visits a web page.
So, it’s wise enough to move the script files to the footer so you may improve your website’s speed significantly. Fortunately, you don’t need an expert to do this job because there are several plugins available that can get it done quickly.
Conclusion
The reason why people often think of making a website faster is that they want to provide a better experience to their audience. There are so many ways you can use to achieve this goal such as changing your website hosting, minifying the codes, Optimizing Images, and more.
With the information, we’ve described in this article, you can easily make your website faster. Still, you can get in touch with us if you need help with implementing these changes.
Need help improving your site speed? The Health Media Experts team has your back. Learn how we can troubleshoot and optimize your site.