In this day and age, where everything is instant, no one will waste their time waiting for a website to load. That is why website speed is a very critical factor to consider when building a website.
If you have a fast downloading website, your customers will have a great experience visiting your page and learning more about your products and services, which can result in better conversions. Moreover, your website speed can help you rank higher on search engines because of higher page visits, views, engagement, as well as lower bounce rates among others.
So when building or revamping a website, here are the things that you need to do to have a fast loading and fully optimized one.
Hosting plays an important role in optimizing the speed of your website. You may want to get a cheaper or basic hosting plan as a start. But as your site grows in usage and content, your site will get slower. With this, you need to upgrade to a more robust hosting plan to maintain an optimized website speed.
Check out these best web hosting providers to help you optimize the speed of your website.
Large images can make your website slower. Before uploading images to your website, make sure they are optimized. Some of the strategies in optimizing your images include changing the resolution, compressing the image, and cropping the picture. You may use Photoshop or another image editing tool to help you optimize your website images.
Plugins can also contribute to the speed of your website. Too many plugins create too many extra files that can increase website load time. You don’t need to avoid using plugins altogether, but reducing it to a minimum and limiting it can have a great impact on your website speed.
Page caching is the process of storing static files like HTML documents and images. This way, the next time a visitor visits your website, it doesn’t have to load everything again. Whilst page caching only works with repeat visitors, it still has a great impact on conversion.
As repeat visitors are close to the buying process, checking your website for the second or third time can mean engagement or conversion. So you don’t want to have a slow loading website during this stage. If you are a WordPress user, you can simply install a caching plugin.
Website baggage are unnecessary things that contribute to your website speed. Some of them were already discussed like large images and plugins. But other website baggage that you should look out for are external scripts, massive databases, too many backups, among others.
The best way to clean or remove this is to do a manual overhaul like removing spam comments one by one and removing older installations of WordPress on your server.
If you need more tips in building an optimized website, don’t forget to check out our other pages for more comprehensive guides and tips.
