Nathan Resnick — March 17, 2017 Follow @naterez94Nobody likes a slow website. In fact, a website that has a delay in the page load time by only 1 second is going to cost you 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and a 7% loss in conversions. That’s a lot to lose for the few extra seconds it takes to load your page.
You might be wondering exactly how fast a fast website should be. There’s no specific answer to that question, but a study by Akamai found that 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
That’s not exactly a lot of time. Luckily for you, there are several easy tricks to fix your slow website and boost its speed. Keep reading for four ways you can accelerate the speed of your website and stop losing out on valuable customers.
1) Figure Out Exactly How Slow Your Site Is
Before you begin the process of speeding up your website, you need to know what you’re working with. The first step to making your website faster is figuring out exactly how slow it is. There are a number of free site performance analysis tools available online to help you.
Google’s Webmaster Tools is a great resource that can tell you your site’s comparative speed. The general rule of thumb is that if your site loads faster than 75 percent of all sites that Google checks, you should be in the clear. If it’s any lower, you’re going to want to keep reading.
2) Reduce Plug-Ins and Java Scripts
If you have a lot of extra features on your website like forms for people to fill out, like buttons, social media feeds, the option to comment and even Google Analytics that tells you what kind of people are visiting your site from where, they may be slowing your page down.
If you have too many of these extra features they can eventually pile up and clog your site. Especially if you have plug-ins that originate from another site like a weather app. If that site’s delivering data at a sluggish rate, your site will suffer.
A quick fix to speed up your site is to clean up the clutter. Remove coded elements that don’t add a significant value to your site. You can also try moving some of these features to other pages on your site to increase the speed.
3) Use Content Delivery Networks
Content delivery networks, otherwise known as CDNs, are basically widely-distributed networks of servers that are located in a variety of geographic locations around the world. They help your website deliver content faster and more consistently to users in different locations.
A CDN works by minimizing the distance between your visitors and your site’s server. It stores a cached version of your site’s content in various locations across the world. Each location is responsible for delivering content to people visiting your site in its proximity.
CDNs allow your site to load faster, especially if you have a lot of visitors in a wide variety of locations. By using a CDN for your website you can save your visitors valuable time and easily increase your web page’s speed.
4) Enable Compression
If your website is large and has a lot of high-quality content, the sheer size of your site might be slowing it down. Sites that hold content more than 100kb are often bulky and slow to load. If this is your site’s problem, the best solution is a little technique called compression.
Compression can significantly reduce the bandwidth of your pages, therefore reducing the HTTP response. By compressing your website, you can reduce the download time by almost 70 percent. With a variety of compression tools available on the web, it’s super simple to speed up your site.
With these four simple to follow tips on how to accelerate the speed of your website, there should be no excuse why your site is still slow. Don’t lose any more views or conversions by having a slow site—speed up your site and business’ chance at success today.
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