Speeding up your website is one of the best things you can do to increase customer satisfaction and ultimately, conversions. There are several different ways to do this and even if you aren’t technically savvy, you can still put a lot of this advice in to practice and see great results.
Update your hosting plan
Though it’s always tempting to save money by choosing the cheapest plan, this isn’t always a good option and could actually cost you more in the long run. Consider plans that deliver slightly above the required bandwidth that you think you need as this will allow for growth and increased numbers of visitors. Plans that use VPS or virtual shared servers can be a good idea as they can handle a fair bit of content without slowing things down.
Get rid of any plug-ins you aren’t using.
Having a website with all the latest plug-ins can be great but remember, unless you have organised a package that can handle that amount of information, the more you have going on behind the scenes, the longer your site will take to load. Strip everything back to the bare minimum at first and just keep the essential content. Plug-ins that aren’t used but are still present as an integral part of the site are essentially useless, so try to focus on what you and your website visitors need the most.
Do an image audit
Its fairly well known that images can take up a very large amount of bandwidth, especially if they have just been dragged and dropped in to a website builder without being optimised. There are techniques such as using a CSS sprite, which contains all of your sites imagery in one place. This means you can still display everything you need to but don’t need to worry about sluggish performance. There are also specific plug-ins for particular website builders that allow you to compress images so they don’t take up too much space. WordPress has WP Smush and Drupal has Kraken, though there are others available.
Fix your broken links
Having broken links on your site is a negative for two main reasons, it eats it up a lot of bandwidth and it also makes it looks unprofessional. Ensure that you spend some time checking and fixing broken links regularly. Google’s own webmaster tool is quite effective and if you use the “crawl errors” tab, it will identify any problem links for you. Essentially, when all of your links are working, your visitors are far less likely to leave your site and look elsewhere.
- Utilise browser caches
In simple terms, browser cacheing is a technique that allows your website users computers’ to store offline versions of the pages they have visited, which means that they don’t need to be loaded from scratch every time. This makes the whole process much quicker and will generally help to keep loading times to a minimum. Depending on the website builder you have used, there are various different plug-ins available. For WordPress, the most popular and easiest to use is W3 total cache.
Cut down your server response time
Your DNS or domain name system will define how quickly your website loads when a new user lands on the page. Like hosting and other services, you generally get what you pay for when it comes to DNS providers, so shop around and ensure that you’re getting the most value for your money. You can compare providers online to see how they rate against each other.
Consider external hosting
If your site has a lot of video content, images or other files that generally take up a lot of space and consequently, bandwidth, it may be a good idea to host them separately to the rest of the content on your site. This means they shouldn’t take as long to load because the server isn’t dealing with as much information. A quick and very cost effective method is using YouTube or Vimeo to host your videos, rather than uploading them directly to your site. The main thing to remember here is to ensure the links are working, so routine maintenance is important. Embedding videos is now quite a straightforward process, so if your site is starting to slow down because of the amount of content you are trying to host yourself, make use of an external option to combat this.
Keep redirects to a minimum
When pages get moved around, deleted or changed, redirecting the web traffic elsewhere is often something that is difficult to avoid, however, too many of them will almost certainly deter your users from returning on a regular basis. There are now tools like Screaming Frog and others, which will search and identify broken links for you, so you don’t need to be a technical master to do this. One or two may be ok if you have to carry out some maintenance, change the design of a page or perhaps refresh the content but most search engines recommend that you try to eliminate them entirely if you can.
Try to keep track of your website’s speed over a period of time
Obviously there are a lot of different factors that can effect your website’s loading speed and trying to change everything can be a long and complex job. If you set aside time to monitor the performance of your site, you can see how effective the changes you are making really are. Pingdom offers a website speed test which will give you a set of results including the percentage of sites that are slower than yours, the average load time and also a “grade” of A, B, C and so on. Checking this regularly whenever you have made changes means you can make sure that what you are doing is helping your site, rather than causing more problems.
Check mobile site speed separately
Most people access the internet via smartphones, so not only should you ensure your site is properly optimised for mobile devices, you should also check to ensure the loading times aren’t too slow when compared to the desktop version. Google has a “test my site” feature that will perform a quick audit for you and highlight any areas of concern such as long loading times.
