No matter if it’s your cheapest PHP hosting or turbo-powered servers, your website speed is a confirmed ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Faster websites are prioritized for improved visibility. The speed is critical in determining the experience of the user, how well the website ranks on search engines, and the conversion rates.
A slow website will irk users, who will likely bounce off the website immediately and subsequently lead to stagnancy in business growth. For example, studies reveal that a single-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by around 7%, affecting your future free website migration process.
If improving your website’s performance, retaining visitors, or increasing visibility on search engines is a target, then optimizing the website speed becomes essential. In this document, we will look into factors that make a website slow, why speed matters, and look at some unparalleled strategies to optimize it.
Why Website Speed Matters
Improved User Experience
Most website visitors expect the website to load within two seconds. In case a website takes longer to load, users tend to abandon the website for competing ones, thus increasing the bounce rate.
Higher Search Engine Rankings
Google uses page speed as a measure to rank the webpages. Websites with faster loading speeds tend to rank at the upper end of the SERPs, which increases the visibility of the website and the organic traffic as well.
Increased Conversion Rates
E-commerce websites stand to lose a large number of customers if pages are slow to load. Having a faster website improves sales, engagement, and overall revenue.
Common Causes of Slow Website Speed
Before performing any corrective actions, it is important to establish the reasons behind slowness.
- Unoptimized Images: Image files that aren’t compressed take much longer to load.
- Inadequate Web Host: A slow web host negatively affects overall performance.
- Excessive HTTP Requests: Too many styles, scripts, and fonts make loading time longer.
- Absence of Caching: Browsers have to reload the full website with every visit.
- Superfluous JavaScript and CSS: Page loading is slowed down by scripts that are loaded late.
- Excessive Use of Plugins: Performance is lower for websites that are plugin-heavy.
- Unoptimized Code: Having too many spaces, superfluous CSS, and slow JavaScript code reduces speed.
ALSO READ: WordPress Hosting vs. Shared Hosting: Key Differences
How to Optimize Your Website for Lightning-Fast Performance: Step by Step
Choose a High-Performance Web Hosting Provider
The choice of the web hosting provider is at the core of every website’s effectiveness. A sluggish hosting plan will greatly affect your performance.
Go for managed hosting providers, as these providers manage all the website’s tasks without needing your manual intervention. Furthermore, choose NVMe SSD drives so that loading times are shortened.
Optimize and Compress Images
If the images on your website are large, then it is obvious that your website will take a longer time to load. In such cases, you can use image optimization techniques to reduce the file size without compromising the quality.
Use WebP format (apart from PNG and JPEG) as they are smaller and load quicker.
Compress images to reduce the image size with TinyPNG or ShortPixel.
Set the website to load images when the user scrolls down, minimizing the first load time.
Enable Browser Caching
The browser gives the privacy where files of the particular website can be stored. With this, you can eliminate the need to reload files on subsequent visits.
Use a caching plugin (for WordPress): WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache.
Leverage Server-Side Caching: Plugins like LiteSpeed caching increase page speed so much easier.
Minify CSS, JavaScript & HTML
Loading times are impacted by too much code, comments, or files with spaces.
Minify CSS & JavaScript: This is possible with plugins such as Autoptimize or WP Fastest Cache Pro.
Combine CSS & JavaScript Files: With fewer HTTP requests, loading times are faster.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Pages make different requests using CSS, JS, images, and fonts; due to these specific separations, results were made for every single request. Fewer requests enhance speed and performance. Remove all the plugins that you don’t need, as they only serve to take up needless space.
Activate a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) consists of several servers strategically distributed around the world. It ensures that the web data is received from the server that is closest to the user.
Reduce the Load of Your Website’s Database
Your website will lag if its database is unkempt. Hence, it is wise to regularly maintain your database by clearing out any superfluous information. Utilize the WP-Optimize plugin to delete spam comments, post edits, and database clutter.
ALSO READ: How to Start a Successful Tech Blog from Scratch?
Conclusion
It’s essential to remember that a website’s speed is particularly important for user interface improvement, increased SEO rankings, and increased conversion. MilesWeb, a leading web hosting service, allows you to do all of this, including optimizing images and caching access, thus achieving impeccable speed.
Speed optimization is made more straightforward by minimizing HTTP requests, JavaScript loading postponement, and regularly checking the website’s performance with Google PageSpeed Insights.
By applying these best practices, your website will be lightning-fast, giving visitors a smooth experience and a lead over your competitors.
