7 Quick Wins to Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed
You could have the most visually appealing website with absolutely mind-blowing content, but if your site takes too long to load, your users won’t stick around long enough to experience it. Slow websites drive away potential business and prevent your site from being found on search engines like Google and Bing.
Slow speeds can also affect customer satisfaction. As one study conducted by the Aberdeen Group shows, even a one-second delay in page loading speed can decrease customer satisfaction by 16 percent and reduce conversion rates by 7 percent. Basically, speed sells, and slower speeds mean less return on your investment.
With that in mind, here are 7 quick wins – the easiest, most inexpensive, and quickest implementations – to improve your website’s loading speed.
1. Upgrade your hosting plan
The most obvious solution for speeding up your site is to have the most bandwidth available to you. Choosing a hosting plan with sufficient bandwidth is one of the most important decisions you will make when building your site, and choosing the wrong plan can have major consequences. You can check out hostingfacts for that much needed information to make a plan.
Many new site owners choose to host through a shared plan because shared plans are cheaper, but what they save you financially in the beginning will end up costing you down the road in slow speeds during high traffic periods. By investing in proper hosting from the beginning of your site’s development (or by upgrading your current shared hosting plan), you’ll eliminate the risk that your site will crash or stall when people need it the most.
For WordPress users, WPBeginner has a list of the top web hosting services that support high speeds. You can also check out this list for the best web hosting services by industry and use case.
2. Choose a responsive theme
When it comes to loading time, a basic responsive site will almost always outweigh a complicated, flash-based site. According to Yahoo, 80% of your site’s loading time will be spent downloading components like images, stylesheets, and scripts. These elements take a lot of time to load, so the more components there are on a page, the slower it will be. Basically, the simpler the site, the faster it will be.
The simplicity of your site’s theme also has a huge impact on loading speeds. If you’re using WordPress, it can be tempting to choose the fanciest flash theme to draw attention to your business, but bulky frameworks and heavy coding can slow down loading speeds for your users. The quickest way to overcome this obstacle is by choosing a responsive or mobile-friendly theme - a theme that responds to each individual user’s screen size.
Responsive designs cut down on unnecessary components and coding allowing for faster loading times. If you’re using WordPress, here’s a compiled list of 100+ responsive website themes that are both beautiful and fast.
3. Streamline your home page
Your homepage is the first impression you’ll make on any visitor. While it can be tempting to go “all out” and inundate them with as many widgets and graphics as possible, having an overwrought homepage can backfire on your site’s performance. By focusing more on content and limiting widgets, graphics, and extra features that may weigh your site down, you’ll not only reduce load times but improve your SEO and give visitors a chance to trust your expertise without the use of over-the-top gimmicks. A simple homepage is a win-win for you and your customers.
A few ways to improve your home page (or any high-traffic landing page) include:
- Showing excerpts instead of full posts for blogs or news sections
- Removing unnecessary widgets or sharing features and putting them on shareable content or on relevant landing pages
- Minimizing flash features like rotating images or videos
4. Enable caching
Enabling caching lets you temporarily store data on a user’s computer so they don’t have to wait for each page to load as they click around the site. Most browsers will save anything from basic images to stylesheets, JavaScript, or even entire landing pages.
Be aware that most caches have a shelf life, however. Static elements like images can be cached up to a week, but third-party elements like ads or widgets can be cached for only a day or so. Optimizing your site with more static elements will help improve caching, which will in turn improve speed.
WordPress sites can use integrated plugins to handle caching for you, such as WP Total Cache or WP Super Cache. There are a few ways you can add caching without using a plugin, but if you’re looking to improve your WordPress site quickly, plugins are the easiest way to go.
5. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Similar to caching, using a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, can reduce download times and improve your sites performance. CDNs take your static files (images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) and host them on servers in geographic locations near your users, giving their computers quicker access. This system provides faster download speeds and can greatly improve your site’s traffic capabilities, as most CDNs also protect against large surges.
6. Optimize your images
They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but pictures that are too big for your site are also worth thousands of lost conversions from slow load times. It’s common practice for many web developers to upload large images and then scale them down using CSS, but the problem with this method is that browsers still load the images at full size even if they appear smaller on the site.
The solution is to scale your images before loading them so you minimize the impact. As a note for designers and developers, make sure you’re using the correct file types, as they can make a big difference on loading speed. Using JPEG and PNG files instead of BMP or TIFF will help increase speeds and reduce download times.
If you have a WordPress site and you need a cheap and easy way to upload optimized photos without bothering your graphic designer, try using integrated plugins like WP-SmushIt or Lazy Load to simplify the process.
7. Delete unused plugins
One of the biggest changes you can make to improve your site’s performance is disabling unused plugins or widgets. It’s important to delete plugins you don’t plan to use - simply deactivating a plugin won’t stop it from taking up space.
It should also be noted that the number of plugins you have active doesn’t always affect loading speeds, and that well-coded and up-to-date plugins will not usually affect your site as much as poorly supported plugins. It’s important to keep track of which plugins you use on a consistent basis and eliminate the ones that don’t add value to your site, while keeping valuable plugins updated to the latest versions.
For WordPress users it’s important to find plugins that are WordPress optimized and have great support from their respective developers.
Final Thoughts
Improving your site’s loading speed can be overwhelming and often involves many different components of your site, but the main thing to remember is that simplicity is key. Focusing on strong content, simple design, optimized elements, and plugins that benefit your pages will all work toward improving speeds. If you’re unsure about your site speed, you can always start by doing a speed test. Below are a few tools to help you determine your site’s current speed.