What would you do in that scenario? Well, the majority of people will leave the website and look for some new website to get their work done. If the same scenario happens to your website, it can lead to a reduced engagement rate, search engine rankings, and increased website bounce rate.
Today’s digitized world has taken away our patience, we want everything to done be quickly and as easily as possible. It applies to your website as well, when a visitor goes through your website, they want it to load as quickly as possible. Hence, having a website with a fast-loading speed is crucial to growing your online presence.
No worries, if your website’s speed is low because there are many ways through which you can optimize the loading speed of your website. Do you want to know about those optimization tactics? If yes, then make sure to read this blog till the end in which we are going to discuss the optimizations that can increase your website’s loading speed.
What is Your Website’s Loading Speed?
The website’s loading speed is how quickly the content of your website gets visible to the visitor every time they navigate through your website. Various factors can affect the speed of a website, some of them are given below:
- The theme and number of plugins installed on your website.
- Size and number of media files such as video, and graphics uploaded on your site.
- Your site’s redirects, coding, and server-side’s scripts.
How To Measure a Website’s Speed?
Before we get ahead to the steps of speed optimization it is important, it is important to know the current loading speed of your website. Various online tools allow you to track your website speed such as Google PageSpeed Insights.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool provided by Google that helps you to analyze the speed of your website on both desktops and mobile devices. To track your site’s speed, you just have to visit the PageSpeed Insights page and type the URL of your website into the text box and click on analyze button.
It will quickly analyze the content on your page and provide you with a score from 0 to 100 for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website. In addition to that, it will also provide you with some suggestions on how you can improve your website’s speed.
All this information gives you an idea about your website’s speed and the area of improvement on your website that can help to boost the loading speed.
Why it is Important to Increase the Loading Speed of Your Website?
As we talked about earlier, every internet user wants to get quick search results and doesn’t want to wait for your website to load. If you have a website with a good loading speed, it will help to increase the engagement rate of your website.
The good loading speed of your website helps to improve the user experience of your web traffic which will make them spend more time & revisit your website. As a result, the audience retention on your site will tend to increase which is good for the SEO of your website.
Search engines like Google also give priority to websites with a good loading speed over websites with a bad loading speed, hence website speed optimization can help to improve the search engine rankings of your website.
Now as you have got to know the importance of a good loading speed, let’s not delay further and take a look at the optimizations that can increase the loading speed of your website.
Steps To Optimize the Loading Speed of Your Website
Delete Unused Plugins
Plugins allow you to add various functions to your website but using them in excess can lead to a decreased loading speed of the website. In addition to that, outdated plugins can be carrying some technical glitches or bugs which can be easily bypassed by hackers to enter into your system.
In some cases, only one plugin can lead to reduced website loading speed, hence it is important to keep track of plugins installed on your website and delete the unused ones to keep your website fast and secure for your web traffic.
Reliable and Fast Hosting
Hosting provider plays an important role in the performance and loading time of your website. To reduce the cost or due to low budget, some website owners tend to choose shared or cheap hosting plans which turns out to be a big mistake.
In a shared hosting plan, multiple websites share the same server to process which increases the loading time of a website. These shared hostings aren’t much secure too, hence it is not advisable to go with them.
Instead, you can always stick to a dedicated and performance-based hosting plan that will help you to enhance the loading speed of your website.
Use a Lightweight and Responsive Theme
Themes are a great way to enhance the look of your website and put an impression on your web traffic but only if used correctly. Themes influence the loading speed of your website and how it will appear on the screens of different devices.
A non-responsive theme will not be able to showcase your website on different devices effectively. As a result, your website will keep loading for a long time and it will make the visitor leave your website.
If your website contains a lot of heavy elements such as media files, graphics etc. then it will take several minutes for your website to load those elements. To avoid that make sure to use a lightweight WordPress theme with responsive design.
Optimize Images
Images enhance the quality of content optimization on your website and help the web traffic to get a better understanding of it. However large sized and non-optimized images can lead to the increased loading time of your website.
Hence, it becomes important to compress and optimize the images on your website. By compressing the image, you can reduce the weight of the file which allows it to load faster and more effectively.
You can also enable lazy loading on your website, this function will only load the particular section of images used by the web traffic and users will not have to load all the elements. This will improve the loading time of your website and provide a good user experience.
Don’t Host Video on Your Server
Hosting a video on your website sounds good to provide an additional form of content to your audience but it might turn out to be a reason for the slow loading speed of your website. Video files are much heavy in size and therefore take more time to load.
Hence it is not advised to self-host a video on your website without an external video player. You can embed video links from external video players such as YouTube to provide an extra piece of content to your audience. In this way, the loading time of your website will not be affected.
Reduce CSS and Javascript
Reducing the CSS and javascript of your website can effectively increase the loading speed of your website. It simply means removing unused elements, and unnecessary blank spaces to reduce the file size.
It will result in a cleaner and more efficient code and increased loading speed for your website. To avoid doing it manually you can use a free autoptimize plugin which will help you to reduce the CSS and javascript automatically.
Avoid Redirects
A redirect on your website prolongs the process of HTTP requests and responses. Due to this, the loading time of your website affects in a bad way. Eliminating unnecessary redirects from your website can help to improve the loading speed of your website.
If you want to track and eliminate the redirects that are unnecessary and incorrectly placed on your website, you can use a redirect mapper tool.
Update Everything
All the elements on your website including themes, plugins, admin panel and hosting need to be updated to run your website effectively. If either of the elements is outdated then it can affect the loading speed of your website.
Therefore, it is mandatory to update everything on your website after several intervals to keep your website running smoothly and effectively.
Conclusion
The loading speed of your website is the first impression to an internet user hence it is important to optimize it. Speed optimization is a long process it’s not like you perform one thing and the next day the speed will be optimized.
You need to keep using the tactics discussed in this blog and keep analyzing the speed of your website for a prolonged period. All these efforts will you to provide a good user-experience for your web traffic and good audience retention, and better rankings for your website.
So, what are you waiting for buddy? Use the above optimization tactics and improve the loading speed of your website.
