Slow-loading websites aren’t good for anyone. It’s not good for your business, and it’s not good for your visitors. In this article, you’ll learn the top 5 ways to increase your site speed and increase conversions.
Why is your website loading slowly?
If you’ve visited a website that is taking longer than it should to load, then it’s likely that you are on a slow website. I can’t emphasize enough how important website speed is to a great user experience.
You don’t want to miss out on opportunities.
You don’t want to lose leads.
You don’t want to annoy visitors.
1. Optimize your images
When you upload media files to your site that haven’t been optimized, it places additional strain on your server because it has to serve all those heavy files to your visitors. It uses a lot of bandwidth and slows your site considerably. So, what you need to do is to optimize your image files and your video files (these are the 2 most common media files uploaded to websites). We use pixlr.com to resize and optimize images. Tinyjpg.com is another excellent tool for image optimization.
2. Decrease page load time
Every time a visitor hits your site, their browser sends an HTTP request to your server asking it to send your files over to them. Each file on your site equals one request. So, if you’ve got a lot of files, whether they are CSS, Javascript, or image files on your website you’re going to have excessive HTTP requests. To reduce this, you can use CSS image sprites and minify your CSS and JavaScript files.
3. Too many ads
Ads are fabulous if you want to have an additional income stream for your site. You can sell banner ad space, you can sign up for Google Adsense or similar ad programs. However, each ad you serve creates additional HTTP requests and can slow down your site’s loading times. Now, you don’t have to get rid of your ads – you just need to be selective. And remember your users don’t go to your site to look at your ads!
4. The importance of caching
Caching your website files will speed up your site. Instead of serving your files to everyone who visits your site (and causing performance issues), caching lessens the stress on your server by serving up static HTML files of your site. Your site will load faster and your visitors will be happier.
5. Clean up your code
Your website is made up of a bunch of codes and files. When your code is not clean, you will unwittingly affect your site’s performance especially if one file conflicts with another file’s code. This is especially true with WordPress plugins. People install plugins without realizing some don’t play well with others and can even cause their site to slow down.
Conclusion
It’s a fact that search engine rankings are important in driving traffic to your website. Google is the biggest search engine, and it is through Google that 90 percent of all traffic is generated. An easy way to improve your website ranking in Google is to use the tips in this article. Most of the tips in this article are easy and straightforward to implement, and they will allow you to increase traffic to your website.
