Website loading Speed is one of the most important aspects of web businesses these days. Slow websites suffer search ranking penalties, a decrease in traffic, and worse conversion rates. Unfortunately, a lot of website owners do not focus on speed as much as they should.
It is mostly due to lack of knowledge on what is hurting your loading speeds.
So here in this post, we present to you simple tweaks one can do to improve their website performance on their own. Any website owner should be aware of these when managing their website.
Let’s start with something obvious. Whenever we talk about loading speed, the first thing that crosses our mind is “if our hosting is fast enough”.
For any type of website built on any platform, it can only load fast when its hosting provider assigns enough server resources to ensure fast server responses. Otherwise, it will be slow no matter how many other tweaks you do.
The most unfortunate thing about the hosting industry is it’s full of false promises or ones that are not entirely true. Not all hosting companies actually implement everything they advertise, which makes it hard to buy the right hosting from a decent company.
All you can do is to test each one of the well-known hosts or read user reviews on hosting providers on forums like Web Hosting Talk.
For the testing part, HostingTribunal.com has tested all top host providers like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Siteground, Hostgator, Inmotion, Ipage, Namecheap and Godaddy to evaluate which amongst them has the best loading speeds.
Beyond the obvious, there are a few tweaks one can do to enhance the loading speed of websites. One key reason why a website might be slow is image size. Images are bulky files that can take up several megabytes of space. As such, they use a lot of bandwidth in order to be downloaded by the user.
Images rarely have to be this large, especially on mobile websites. You can use a visual editor or one of the online image compression tools to reduce image size before uploading them. You will notice an immediate speed improvement.
Similar to reducing the size of images, GZIP compression helps in reducing the amount of data the host server sends to the client browser.
GZIP compresses the actual code of your web page before sending. This can improve load times by up to 80% and is a necessity for all websites.
Another common bottleneck is not enabling server caching. Caching is a great way to reduce the usage of server resources.
Here’s how it works.
When a client requests to see a dynamic web page, the server has to generate it from the source code. Pages don’t exist as separate documents.
This is not a problem if one person visits a page. But if you get a surge of users who all want the same page, your server has to generate the same page over and over for each of them.
Server-side caching helps with this. Enabling caching means the server stores static page content (like text or images) as separate files. That way the server doesn’t have to generate an entire page for every new visitor. This saves time and server resources.
In the end, there are many other bottlenecks to look out for. However, these are the four common ones. Keep an eye out for them and your website will be much faster.
Besides these tips, here are a few insightful points on how important is the loading speed.
