7 Things To Do To Optimize Your Website’s Speed

More than 10 years ago, the Aberdeen Group claimed that if a website didn’t load in just 3 seconds, users would lose interest and move  to another website. This rule still applies today. Customer satisfaction is closely tied to website load speed, and some studies have shown that conversion rates drop with a delay of 7% per second.

In short, website speed is strongly correlated with a company’s success rate. One of the easiest and fastest ways to get more customers and increase conversion rates is to get your website loaded quickly. This can only be done if the website is built for speed and efficiency. In addition to the specific style and aesthetic elements of web design, there are important technical aspects to loading a website quickly.

Here are 7 things you should take note of to optimize your website’s speed.

1. Reduce Image Sizes

According to a HubSpot survey from late 2018, 32% of marketers believe visual images are the most crucial type of content for their brand. It is obvious that we all enjoy visuals. They pique the user’s interest, and with strategically placed photographs, your site will look stunning.

Utilizing too many photographs or photos that are too huge in size will slow down the loading speed of your website.

To solve that, try these ways to reduce image sizes:

• Use modern photo formats, such as WebP or JPEG XR, to help reduce image size by 20 to 50 -percent without sacrificing the original image quality.
• Alternatively, you can save the image as a PNG or JPEG.
• Reduce the image’s file size in any editor, such as Photoshop.
• Crop the image.
• Use good plugins such as WP Smash to compressing photos quickly.

2. Use The Right Typography

Typography is an important factor in relation to website design, readability, and accessibility. Using the correct Webfont ensures that you adhere to the aforementioned Google best practice.

Each font is regarded as an additional resource that must be loaded. When fonts are used incorrectly, they can cause website rendering blockage, resulting in increased load time.

Here is a list of web font formats and their browser compatibility:

• WOFF 2.0: To browsers that support them.
• WOFF: To majority of browsers
• TTF: To older Android browsers (below 4.4).
• EOT: To older IE browsers (below IE9).

3. Reduce Redirects

Redirects are instructions that bring users to another location automatically.

Each reroute on your site has an impact on its speed. This is due to the additional steps required to be rerouted. If your site uses redirect chains, your page load times will be slowed even more.

Redirections are sometimes necessary – They’re used on a lot of websites. So what should you do?

Remove any redirects to pages that are no longer working or that receive no incoming traffic from your website. Reducing the amount of redirections can improve the speed of your website for sure.

As a general guideline, avoid redirects as much as possible. Each redirect is another hurdle that users must leap through, and by decreasing them, you can optimize the loading times of your site.

4. Take Advantage of Browser Caching

Caching is one of the most important measures in optimizing the loading times of your website. By enabling browser caching, you instruct your visitors’ browsers to temporarily store some (or all) of your site’s static files on their computers.

Because those visitors won’t have to refresh your site completely every time they return, subsequent visits should be substantially faster. There are numerous methods to use browser caching in WordPress, and if you haven’t done it before, now is the time.

5. Avoid overcrowding your homepage.

If you only remember one thing from this article, make it this one. The most important thing to know is to keep it simple and avoid unnecessarily long homepages.

Overcrowding your homepage with material and media (text, graphics, videos, and animations) might harm your success. It may take too long to load, and it may overload your visitors to the point that they overlook the key content on your website and depart without interacting with it.

A well-organized homepage with limited material will allow your site visitors to effortlessly absorb the offered information from the minute they approach your website, allowing them to grasp your core message more quickly.

6. When feasible, prioritize text above other design elements.

Text, as previously said, loads faster than graphics and animations. But this isn’t the only reason you should pay attention to pretty words in your design. A quick-loading text header rapidly draws attention to your site’s core message, improving your visitors’ overall experience.

The other major cause is SEO (search engine optimization), which refers to the efforts made to guarantee that your website appears higher in search results for specific keywords.

Without going into too much detail, there is one thing to keep in mind: Text that is detailed and of good quality will help Google (and other search engines) better grasp what your website is about, directly enhancing your chances of ranking higher.

sMedia only has an indirect SEO influence because it improves your visitors’ overall experience or makes them stay on your page longer.

As a result, if you want to choose the best type of content to attract more people to your website, text is the way to go.

7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Most types of hosting (excluding cloud hosting) place your website on a single server with a specified location. Every visitor must connect to that server in order for your website to load, which may cause bottlenecks.

CDNs are global clusters of servers that store copies of websites. That is, your site can be hosted in the United States but use a CDN with servers in Latin America, Europe, and the rest of the world. If a visitor from Brazil attempts to access your website, the CDN will serve it from its Latin American servers.

This configuration gives you two benefits:

• It reduces the load on your servers.
• It translates to lower loading times for international visitors.

If you run a popular website, spending a bit of money on a CDN can significantly impact your site’s loading times.