How to Optimize Website Load Time

How to Optimize Website Load Time – Optimize Load Time

How to Optimize Website Load Time in Today’s consumer-driven world thrives on ‘immediacy and speed’ and need to have information at their fingertips, regardless of where they are. On-the-go mobile content is gaining in popularity and millions of websites are competing with each other to attract customers.

How to Optimize Website Load Time is still a myth for new bees. While many factors go into the designing of a good website, if your site doesn’t render fast enough on a mobile device, you have lost a customer. Nothing puts off prospects and visitors more than a slow loading site and this has often been a prime factor for customers abandoning their purchase. You lose out and your competitor gains.

A fast site may not the be-all and end-all when it comes to search engine rankings, but an otherwise good website could be ranked lower because of slow page load time. So it’s important to know how well your site is doing in terms of speed and if need be, do what is required to make it faster.

So, if site speed matters, you need to overhaul your slow website in order to enhance user experience. Slow page loads and hence slow site speed means that search engines such as Google can crawl fewer pages and that affects indexation. Here are some things that you can do to make page loads faster.

Make your Web server faster and check your plugins

Your website depends on your Web server, which ideally needs to be able to handle additional demands as traffic increases. Ensuring that server resources are more than adequate to meet peak influxes of traffic is one way of turbocharging your site speed. Plugins can be useful things to have around as they perform complex operations but too many poor quality plugins can actually hurt your site rather than benefit it.

Be selective with your images

Visuals are great for any site but image files may be slow to render. So ensure you use the right size, the right type of image (.jpg, .png, .gif) and see that you adjust image displays. The fewer the pixels, the faster the rendering. Physically compressed images help reduce the image dimensions and optimize image files- 15-50kB is about the ideal size. Remember, merely resizing the images won’t work, because though the physical dimensions change, the pixel dimensions remain the same- you need to ensure that you do both.A software application such as Gzip can be used to reduce the size of HTML, JavaScript files while programs like Photoshop can be used to compress images without compromising quality.

Optimize code for your Web pages

Using minimalistic code augurs for smaller files and faster page loading. Remove commas, spaces, and all other unnecessary characters. Also do away with code comments, any formatting you used and other unused code. This is bound to increase your page speed.

Content Delivery Networks a boon

A contentinery network is a network of Web servers that are housed across multiple locations. This means copies of your site are stored in various data centers across the globe. This ensures that data is delivered quicker because it has to travel smaller distances to reach a Web server. These CDNs are quick and easy to set up and many of them integrate well with WordPress, Magento, Joomla and other platforms. Hosting files on a CDN is a great way to increase site speed and it also saves up to 60 percent bandwidth. A good host, a good CDN, and good website design does wonders for website speed.

Go slow on redirects

When a user is redirected from one URL to another, site speed suffers. This is because each URL triggers a HTTP request and this slows the process down. It makes greater sense to reference the target page directly and thus reduce redirects.

There are Google tools that test load time of your website, sees how it holds up under traffic surges and offer suggestions for improvement. So do give a thought to site speed and if your website is not up to the mark, take steps to decrease page load times. It could just boost you up the SEO ladder!

If you are wondering at how to optimize your e-commerce website store here are 10 essential for building e-commerce sites!