5 Tips to Improve your Website Speed in 2019
Every website can use a performance boost. Apart from being one of the main factors for your Google ranking, load-page time is crucial for the professional look of your business. With growing Internet speed, the patience of users is going thinner and thinner. That is why quality user experience inevitably goes through having a well-structured website with fast loading speed.
Research shows that 40% of online buyers worldwide will leave your website if it has not loaded by the 3rd second, and 47% of them are expecting that your website would have loaded by the 2nd. Tests from Google have proved that a delay of just half a second can lead to a decrease in traffic by 20%. This is the reason why search engines have prioritized the “fast loading time” as a primary factor when It comes to ranking. So these statistics lead to only one question. How can you improve your website speed?
Resize your images
Big in size graphic files takes longer time to load. That is why it is essential to upload these files in the format and size that we will need them. There is no point in uploading a 5300 x 3800 file if the layout of our page is going to show it in 1400 x 900 pixels. Also, a small compression in image quality usually can’t be noticed with the naked eye of the website visitor. Take the time to processes your images and you will benefit from making your pages lighter. If you are not comfortable with photo editing software like Photoshop or Lightroom you can use free online tools that will do the job for you. Pic Resize и Resize-photos are good options. As for the format of the files – JPEG is the most preferred.
Utilize a CDN
The so-called Content Delivery Networks (CDN) function by replicating the data of your website on many servers that are situated in different geographical locations. By doing so, they enable this data to always stay at the closest physical location possible to your website visitors. This way the content of your page travels less time to the client, which makes your website lighter. But the faster loading is not the only benefit of using a CDN. The improved security is also a significant benefit. The effects of CDN are not to be underestimated. In fact, you can read the following article and find out why you should use a CDN on your site.
Minimize the code
Every piece of unnecessary code adds to the total size of your webpage. One of the best ways to check which lines of code could be reduced is to do it through PageSpeed Insights. The free tool will show you where the code could be minimized. Along with that, it will give you information about the biggest problems that affect negatively your website speed. Make sure to run a check in this incredibly useful tool so that you can give a positive experience to your customers.
Reduce the number of plugins/extensions
If you are using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Magento or Drupal it is almost impossible that you are not using at least one plugin. Our advice is: make sure you are going to keep only those that you will actually use. If you install one plugin to try it, and you end up not liking its functionality, it is better to uninstall it. Otherwise, you are adding more bytes to your server. Repeat this process over and over again, and you have a website that is heavier because of plugins that are just staying there, serving no purpose.
Enable caching
This is one of the most popular ways to speed up your website. The method works by transforming your pages into static HTML versions, thus reducing the database queries. The main benefit for the visitors is that they will get access to the page much faster. Most CMS platforms have plugins that will do this for you. However, there is a tool called LiteSpeed – a lightweight web server, that will dramatically improve your website speed and performance. The web server acting as a drop in for Apache has been outperforming the competition for years and with combination with the LiteSpeed WordPress Plugin, we have managed to reach top performance levels. Read more about LiteSpeed and its benefits on our article.
Those have been our 5 methods to quickly improve your website speed and its performance. Retain your visitors and don’t worry about slow loading pages anymore. Has your SEO rank improved yet?