The internet provides extensive information in an instant. However, as much as people expect to receive data within seconds, many websites load at a very slow pace. Instead of being able to immediately retrieve the information they need, users have to sit and wait, sometimes as long as ten minutes, just for a single webpage to load.
If your company’s website works at a very slow pace, expect a reduction in your traffic. Not only do users find your website annoyingly slow, but search crawlers are also turned off by the sluggish pace of your webpage. Instead of quickly crawling your site, search engines have to wait, wasting a huge amount of time and increasing the chance that a user will give up and try something else. You can see how this can decrease your traffic and, thus, dwindle sales.
To avoid the unwanted consequences of slow webpages, here are some tips on how you can improve your site’s loading speed:
Link Instead of Importing – Imported style sheets load differently and much more quickly than when you simply link them. It is advisable to do so.
Make Use of Caching – Files that upload normally must first send a request to the server prior to loading, which adds an extra step to the process. To avoid this issue, use caching instead, as it stores particular files for a specific period of time and the page can simply grab them when needed. It is much faster than undergoing a request process, so store your more popular files that need to be accessed frequently.
Work with a Less-Loaded and Proven Fast Web Server – Since you will need to host your site on a web server, make sure you choose one that guarantees a faster loading time. Very popular and more fully-loaded servers often load slower because there are so many other websites that are sharing it with you. Evaluate your site’s needs and compare them to the features offered by your server. If it is not living up to what you need, you may need to consider switching to a different one.
Optimize Your Images Properly – Many websites load slowly because of their images. If you have images that could be slowing the speed of your site, take them down and replace them with more compressed photos. Otherwise, optimize them well to speed up your website. Use the photo dimensions that are right for your blog and resample your images accordingly. Generally, images need to be resampled to 72ppi.
Select the Right Theme for Your Website – Themes that have a great number of images and scripts can easily slow down your site. Although beautiful themes are very catchy, sometimes, the sluggish loading of your site will prevent your users from appreciate its beauty anyway. So, examine your theme to see if it might be the problem. Make sure it has a CSS menu and not an image-based menu. Also, stay away from themes with heavy images and then test it yourself to see if it loads fast enough for your standards. That will be a good indication of how it works for others.
Enhancing the speed of your website can sometimes be complicated and take time. However, working with experts in a SEO company will help the process move more quickly. SEO companies provide SEO services that will help you increase your traffic and eventually increasing your revenue. Improving the speed of your site is one of many strategies they can implement for you.
