Improving website speed
There are a number of reasons why the speed of your website needs to be carefully monitored.
Firstly, website speed affects user experience. If your website takes too long to load, users will quickly become frustrated and may even leave your site before it finishes loading. Nobody likes waiting around for a website to load, right?
Secondly, website speed can affect your search engine rankings. Search engines like Google use website speed as a ranking factor, meaning that if your site is slow, it may not appear as high up in search engine results pages. And we all know that being on the first page of Google is important for getting traffic to your site!
Finally, website speed can impact your conversion rates. If users have to wait too long for your site to load, they may become impatient and leave without making a purchase or filling out a contact form. So, if you want to drive more conversions and ultimately make more money, it’s important to make sure your website loads quickly.
There are plenty of ways you can improve your website speed:
Hosting: Choose a good hosting company – like us! As with most things, you get what you pay for – don’t expect a $5 a month hosting plan to offer you the fastest loading times.
Optimize images: Large image files can significantly slow down your website. Optimize images by compressing them without sacrificing quality. Use image compression tools or plugins to do this. You should also use AVIF or WEBP files
Minimize HTTP requests: Minimize the number of requests needed to load a page by combining or minifying CSS and JavaScript files.
Enable browser caching: When a user visits your site, certain files can be saved in their browser cache so they don’t need to be downloaded again on subsequent visits. A caching plugin can cache certain resources on the server to speed up loading times and reduce server workload.
Optimize code: Ensure that your website’s code is optimized and streamlined for faster loading times.
Implement lazy loading: Lazy loading is a technique where images and other resources are loaded only when they come into view, reducing the initial load time of a page.
Limit external scripts: Limit the use of external scripts on your website as they can slow down page loading times.
When we build your website, we make sure that ALL of the steps above are taken. After all, there’s no point in having a great looking website that takes so long to load your visitors give up and go somewhere else!