Is your website not getting enough conversions? Have you ever delved deeper into the issue to know the challenge? What impedes the speed of your website?
In this article, we shall attempt to establish a strong link between website speed and resulting conversions. In the world of online business, a website has to pass the checklist of all the possible factors and page speed is one of them.
Internet is increasingly becoming the place where people tend to be less patient and want information with the snap of a finger. They like to get their website loaded as quickly as possible. According to a recent survey, 47% users abandon website that takes more than 3 seconds.
So it’s highly pertinent not to irritate your visitors with a low downloading speed. No matter how good your products or services are if your website speed is not up to the mark, they shall abandon your website right away.
Page speed is the main point of concern for every online business and it will impact search rankings, website traffic, conversion rates and sales. For that, you need to optimize the website speed not only for desktop but for mobile as well. A delay of even 1 second can cost your business several thousand dollars.
This means you have to understand the importance of the webpage speed for your business. It is important to note that top ranking is just not enough to have more conversions; website speed optimization will also go a long way in having more customers.
If you want to generate more revenue from your website, let me help you to effectively optimize your website speed. Here’s how you can do it:
Invest a good amount on hosting services:
Hosting of the website is an essential part while you are going to optimize your website speed. When you make your website accessible to the public, you have to make sure it is safe, secure and fast. With the rapid evolution of technology, there are better solutions for all technical issues.
Before investing on a good hosting service, you need to focus on certain important factors. For example, where do you want to host your website? Which country do you need to pick for hosting? What kind of server are you using? Is it shared hosting, dedicated hosting or cloud hosting? Thus, it is crucial to understand the difference between hosting services because each hosting technology will impact your website’s performance.
Server response and cookies also play an important role in users accessing your webpage from the server. Since a user can visit your website from any part of the world, the manner in which your hosting server handles such queries shall make a big difference in making your website really fast.
Are you well-prepared for cloud hosting services that allow your user to access your website from any location easily and in less time?
From that perspective, it’s a good idea to finalize your business goals and target a specific market; so that you know what hosting service would be the best option for you.
There are a number of website hosting companies that have well-optimizing hosting servers, especially for speed and security. Always go with the best hosting service providers; once you get solutions as per your website’s needs then you shall see tangible improvements on your website.
Minimize HTTP requests
Though designers and developers are experts in their domain and can effectively fulfill their tasks, but they are less likely to deal with the issue of HTTP request. For every marketer, it is required to understand the process of backend operations of the website.
What is HTTP request? How HTTP request can affect your website speed and how it works? Every request sent by the users from any devices to access any webpage is an HTTP request and each file has its own path as well as storage place on the server. So accessing each component of the page will be additional HTTP request, which sends data from server to device. Every single file would be a request and if you have fewer files on the server or pages then your website will be downloaded. Don’t keep the size of your files too large. Rather compress images, CSS and java script.
You can use Google Chrome’s Network Panel to check how many HTTP requests a site makes.
Remove your unnecessary images from the server, compress or reduce the size of used images.
Merge the all CSS files of your website into one file so that CSS can be accessed easily. Reduce the HTTP request for accessing multiple CSS files. It will be a challenge for designers to manage all CSS in one file. Merge JavaScript too or make it asynchronous so that it can load at the same time.
Enable Browser Caching
A cache is a high-speed data storage layer which stores a subset of data, typically transient in nature, so that future requests for that data are served up faster. In caching, a temporary file is stored on the browser and the server, which plays a critical role in improving loading speed of your website. It helps users return load website data from their browser caching history without sending HTTP request to the server.
You need to enable browser caching options so that these elements can be stored at the user end.
By enabling this function, you are not just improving the speed of your website but also improving customer experience too.
Reduce Image Size:
Images improve the user experience and deliver more information but it takes time to load larger size images. Images can be compressed or can be used in the format like JPEG 2000, WebP and JPEGXR that reduce the size of file and load them faster as compared to the JPEJ and PNG files. You can choose image format as per the use of the image and make sure to use appropriate dimensions.
You can defer or crop off-screen images. There are several tools that can help you compress images, like Adobe Photoshop, Paint.NET, JEPG Mini, etc .Moreover, you can use them without losing the quality of the images.
You can read goggle suggestion on how we can optimize images here.
Don’t forget to consider using responsive and mobile friendly images. It is also important to display images with high quality on every device. For e-commerce websites, the quality of images is the key to improve the conversion rates.
Compress your website with Gzip
Gzip is a method used to minimize the size of files and compress them, thereby helping users load them faster and better. Compression is a simple yet effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site. This will reduce the size of website text, html, JavaScript, CSS and XML files and you can enable this function via htaccess, Apache, Nginx and other webservers, while this can be only done at the server end. You can check how to implement this technique on your website and use tools like Giftofspeed to check whether the Gzip is enabled or not.
Use of CDN (Content Delivery Network)
If your website is getting a huge quantum of traffic then one server alone can’t send response immediately and due to high load, the speed of your website will become slow. The number one reason for using a CDN is to improve your user’s experience in terms of speed. CDN is basically used to reduce the load of the server and host media and other files globally on multiple servers so that userscan access from their nearby located servers. You can use MaxCDN and Cloudflare for CDN services.
Reduce server response time and Multiple Redirections
Redirection is necessary to implement for removed and outdated pages to redirect them to the new pages. The most commonly used redirections are 301 and 302.However, using multiple redirections for your web pages can make the retrieval of data fairly lengthy which can take too long to send HTTP request to the server. As a result, it slows the webpage downloading speed.
For example – “example.com/abc.html” first redirected to the page “example.com/abd.html” and then to “example.com/abe.html” and finally redirected to the final URL “example.com/acb.html”, this kind of redirection must be avoided. By avoiding this you can reduce server response time and make some improvement on webpage loading.
You can also use tools like Screamingfrog or Smallseotools to check the status of webpage redirections.
Reduce the number of plug-ins, Scripts on your site
Plug-ins are required to customize a website. But adding unnecessary plug-ins and scripts to the website can lower its downloading time. Deactivate, uninstalled or delete unused plug-ins and if you are using old version of plug-ins, then you must have to update them with the latest version. At the same time, don’t deactivate all plug-ins as it shall affect your website design and other functions. You need to check the cause behind an issue and fix it accordingly.
