Steps to Lightning Page Speed of Your Website
Website loading speed has become one of the most significant factors nowadays that determine the value of your site in the search engine result page and its ranking position. Google’s effort of making its search algorithms perfect has made website loading speed optimization a must for webmasters who want to rank well in the search engine result page (SERP).
A slow website is also harmful to your business as the users are reluctant to spend time on a site that loads very slowly. However, it’s not just your potential customers that hate slow website – Google and other search engines have also started to penalize slow-loading sites. Most of the search engines now consider website loading speed as a ranking factor, and to improve the online presence of your website, you must employ a significant amount of time in correcting your site’s loading speed error.
With all of these points in mind, you must keep the following things in mind to make sure your website runs smoothly and in no time.
Lower Down the HTTP Requests:
One of the most critical factors that determine the loading time of a website is the number of HTTP requests it sends before it is fully loaded. Given the highly interactive user interface nowadays, it is quite common to find websites that need to load at least a handful of images each time when a user tries to load the site. A website sends an HTTP request each time when an image is being loaded, which slows down your website loading speed. The more pictures in a website layout, the more HTTP requests it sends each time – which is high enough to hinder your website from loading faster. The only solution to get rid of this problem is to compress all your website images by using CSS. Combining images into CSS sprites can make your website load insanely faster than anything else.
Use of Caching for E-Commerce Websites:
User experience matters the most for an e-commerce website, and it is essential to optimize the loading speed of your online store so that it loads fast even when it receives a large amount of traffic. Using caching is a sure way to make your eCommerce website runs smoother as it prevents unnecessary loading files. Caching technique stores data of a page into the memory so that when anyone opens the same website in the next time, it loads from the mind instead of from server.
Try to Use Content in an Optimized Way:
According to Google’s best SEO practices rule, a website with long and descriptive content with a significant number of shareable videos, images tend to attract more customers and rank higher in the search engine result page. This could be an effective SEO practice but can reduce the website loading speed. Therefore, it is important to use contents in an optimized way so that it takes minimum space and consumes lesser bandwidth while loading.
Consider Changing Your Hosting:
There are times when a site runs extremely slow because of an unreliable hosting provider. Using these types of hosting harms your user experience as well. The golden rule to research a bit and choose a reliable hosting provider. However, you should not use a hosting just because it worked well for someone else’s site, because the concept that one type of hosting will work best for all kinds of website is not genuine at all.
Avoid Using Unnecessary Plugins:
If your website is built by using a WordPress Theme and you are using a lot of additional plugins, it can significantly slow down the site. WordPress plugins are, and many developers use the same because of their easy accessibility and ease of use. However, using additional plugins in a single site will slow down its loading speed and result in negative user experience. The best way to get rid of this problem is to remove plugins that are not in use.
Use Content Delivery Networks:
One common practice of improving the website loading time is to use a good content delivery network (CDN). CDNs are an enormous collection of servers placed in different locations all over the globe. The benefit of using CDN is that it stores several copies of your website on different servers in different areas. As a result, users, visiting your website from their locations, will be able to access the website that is hosted in the same place. The result is a faster loading website with superb user experience.