This article will walk you through 10 steps to immediately improve your website speed, even without a background in web development.
4.42%. Additional research shows that every one-second delay in your website’s loading time also means 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
No matter how well-developed your content marketing strategy is, your ROI will suffer if your website loads at a snail’s pace while your customers expect something closer to the lightning speed.
Why is page speed so important?
Website speed is getting faster, and user expectations are increasing alongside it. Research shows that 78% of all website pages now have 5 seconds or less load time. We already know those first five seconds are crucial, and if your website isn’t loading in that target 0-4 second range, you’re likely lagging behind your competitors.
Website speed also makes an impact on user experience and brand perception. As your website takes longer to load, user attention shifts away from their original goal toward the fact that they’re waiting — and they won’t stay long. As conversion rates drop with every additional second of loading, bounce rates increase as people leave your site.
When you improve your website speed, you get your web visitors the information they need as quickly as possible, optimizing their experience on your site and their view of your brand.
Now let’s cover ten easy steps to help you do it.
Ten easy steps to improve website speed
- Measure your website speed
First thing’s first: to improve website speed, you need to understand its current position. You can measure your current website speed using these free helpful tools:
GTmetrix
Google’s Page Speed Insights
Dareboost
These tools tell you how long it takes your site to load and give you specific suggestions to improve website speed, SEO, and security. Even after you follow the steps in this article and improve your site’s speed, I recommend using these tools regularly to measure your progress and quickly address new issues.
- Optimize images
High-quality, high-resolution images are a must for enhancing your written content. Visual content helps to tell the story you’re trying to get across in every blog post, landing page, and static page on your site. It also makes your content more engaging for users.
But if you’re not careful, these same visuals will weigh your website down like a ton of bricks, significantly slowing downloading time.
Here’s the problem: when you upload an image and scale it down with your website’s CSS, the browser loads the larger size, slowing down your load time. So, don’t upload huge images. Shrink them first. Just because you’ve set image height and width parameters to 200 pixels on your content management system doesn’t mean the file size is smaller. When you upload a 1000 pixels-squared image, that’s the size your bandwidth has to cope with.
Here’s the solution:
First, crop and resize with image editing software before you upload. Next, compress your images. Free image compression tools like TinyPNG will reduce the file size without impacting image quality.
Upload your image. Try doing this with all the images on your site. Test your page speed beforehand. Then resize, compress and re-upload. Analyze again and check out how much faster your website loads.
- Enable compression
Your site may already be set up for file compression. If you’re not sure, it’s worth it to check and make sure it’s enabled. Turning this setting on can reduce your file size by 50% or more. You can use this free GZIP compression tool to test if your site is enabled.
Next, follow these steps to set it up based on your webserver configuration. It’s usually as simple as adding code to your website’s file manager.
- Minify your code
You’ve probably noticed that as we cover how to improve website speed, the trend is: go smaller, load faster. And that brings us to minifying. When you analyze your website’s page speed, you’re likely to see a suggestion to “minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.”
Minifying is another process for pairing down file size by taking out what is unnecessary without impacting the look or functionality of your website. In other words, you’re cleaning up your site’s code by eliminating white space, line breaks, unnecessary characters, and programmer comments on your files.
These extra characters and spaces were originally added to improve your code’s readability for programmers. Taking them out won’t change your site, but it will shrink the file size.
Depending on how much extra space was used when your programmer developed your site, minifying may achieve a decent file size decrease — and subsequent page speed increase.
There are different ways to minify. If you use WordPress, an effortless way is to use a plugin such as BetterWordPress Minify, Assets Minify, WP Super Minify, or WP Minify Options.
- Reduce redirects
Excessive redirects on your website can negatively impact its loading time. Every time your site redirects to another page, your web visitors experience longer wait times waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete.
While some redirects are necessary, you can improve website speed by eliminating the ones you don’t need. You can use some helpful tools to help you do it, including this Redirect Mapper or Screaming Frog’s website crawler.
Once you identify duplicate redirects and those that aren’t serving a purpose, you can eliminate those you don’t need to improve website speed.
- Choose a performance-optimized hosting provider
Your website hosting provider can make a big impact on your website speed. Your web host is the middleman between your website pages and files and your end-users.
When you settle for mediocre (or worse) hosting to save financially, you risk long-term performance issues that can have serious consequences. Trust me when I say it’s worth investing in reliable, high-quality hosting that helps optimize your website performance.
- Use a content delivery network
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are servers that provide faster and more reliable access to your website by storing copies of your site at multiple data centers around the world. CDNs work with (not instead of) your web hosting platform. They improve website speed by reducing the distance between browsers and your website’s host servers. There are many CDN providers you can choose from — here’s more on how to spot the qualities of a good one.
- Use webpage and browser caching
Browsers use caching to avoid having to reload entire pages every time a user returns to your site. They cache objects like stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more. We know it’s important to improve website speed for first-time users, but enabling caching can cut additional seconds off that already-quick loading time for returning users. Why not take advantage?
- Embrace minimalism
Make your site more minimalistic. Be intentional about how your visual content, plugins and widgets, and website redirects add value to your website. Eliminate those that don’t serve a clear purpose. When it comes to design, consider that less is more. Don’t crowd your site with objects that need to be loaded if they aren’t driving potential customers toward an end goal.
- Reduce server response time
One of the biggest factors in how quickly your page loads is how much time your DNS lookup takes.
A DNS, or domain name system, is a server with a database of IP addresses and their associated hostnames. When a user types a URL into their browser, a DNS server is what translates that URL into the IP address that indicates its location online.
A DNS lookup, then, is the process of finding a specific DNS record. You can think of it as your computer looking up a number in a phone book.
If you’re using a slow DNS, this increases the time it takes for browsers to locate your site. Switching to a faster DNS provider can speed up the process.
Conclusion
Getting your page load times to where you want them to be is a challenging undertaking but will significantly positively impact your overall site performance.
It’s also important to remember that while all of the tips on this page can help you achieve your site speed goals, you don’t need to implement them today.
Spend some time looking through your site’s speed test results and looking for the issues that have the greatest impact on your load times. Focus on those high-impact factors and take the necessary steps to get them into shape.
You can work your way through this list and look for other easy wins. While some of the tips here may require help from a developer, some of them can be done in under an hour.
And though some of them may seem minor, even small steps toward reducing load time can make a difference, and when you consider the impact that even one second can have on your conversions and success, they’re entirely worth it.
It’s time for you to improve website speed and give users the best possible experience when they visit your online store.
Good luck to you!
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