If you have ever tried to access a website, and it takes longer than a second or two to load, you will often leave it fast. One doesn’t need to be an SEO expert to know that slow websites result in low traffic.
If the website is for your business or if the website is your business, then understanding why it needs to be fast is critical in improving your SEO ranking.
So, how do you make your website faster for everyone?
Understand your visitors
People access the internet on different devices. Thus, in order to boost the speed at which your website loads, always optimize your webpage’s speed and experience according to the visitors.
Your web developer will often have this information and will suggest different methods of boosting the webpage speed on different devices.
Improve your hosting plan
When first starting out, we will often sign up for cheaper hosting services, which often means shared hosting.
However, as the sites grow in both content and usage, they become slower. If you have been using shared hosting, consider upgrading your hosting plan to more dedicated hosting services.
Make images web-friendly
The size of the images you use on your site makes a big difference when it comes to speed loading time. The larger the images, the slower your site will load.
So, consider reducing the file sizes of images used on your site or reducing the number of images on the site.
To reduce the file size, you can do one of these three things:
- Change resolution – reducing the quality of the image reduces its size.
- Compressing the image – compressing an image increases the efficiency of data processing and storage.
- Crop the image – cropping an image cuts out unnecessary areas and thus, makes the image smaller.
Use page caching
Page caching refers to the feature where webpages store static files such as images and HTML documents, thus allowing visitors to access the page quicker. This is because the webpage doesn’t have to retrieve each file each time there is a request.
However, caching only works with repeat visitors, as the page will often need to load the files at least once before storing them. This means, first-time visitors might have it slower but will experience fast webpage loads in subsequent visits.
There are many ways to improve your webpage speed and boost your website, so find a web developer who will advise you on the best to use.
