What could be more frustrating than a slow website?
When your business website takes more than a couple of seconds to load, your online users don’t wait. Slow loading speed drives away visitors. Slow speed reduces organic traffic. Meaning, this directly affects Search Engine Ranking. This also translates that your website will likely to rank low and less exposure will affect your conversion goal.
Google and other search engines don’t like sites having slow loading speed- more importantly, users don’t stay. They stop coming to your site, bounce back and never convert into consumers.
How does site loading speed matter?
Picture this: You got an important link and it’s taking forever to load. What would you do? The obvious- switch back to other similar sites with faster loading speed.
It’s very easy to imagine why we love faster loading site over the slow one. And Google will always prefer the site to show on top that we all love to browse. According to a research done by Google in 2018, almost 53% of mobile users skip the site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Not just for Google, every search engine platforms have continually emphasized the need of having fast-loading websites.
Consider your hosting plan:
This is one of the basic points. Most budget-constrained online businesses tend to opt for cheap way with the shared hosting facility. However, with the number of sites and the amount of content being uploaded regularly, the speed gets slower. Dedicated hosting gives you complete flexibility to run your website in complete ease without sharing your space with others.
Assess your website performance:
There are many free website speed analysis tools available online. It’s very easy to check the speed and other performance metrics. Once you have an idea where your website is, you can work on the speed issues.
One of the most popular and authentic tool is Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check web performance on both mobile and desktop. You need to add the URL of the website and analyse. With an overall percentage, this tool will also give you an overview of the areas you need to improve in terms to boost page speed and web performance.
Use plugins carefully
Too many plugins in a WordPress site can cause slower loading speed. Using plugins sparingly can save you in many ways. Try to use the most important plugins and avoid inundating the site by creating extra files. If you’re not very familiar with the use of plugins, you better talk to your dedicated website developers to find the best way to get your website working smoothly.
Proper website optimization:
Page loading speed is one of the major ranking factors. If you work on your website’s ranking factor with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it can help you reduce page speed errors. When it comes to fixing site issues for SEO MOZ is one of the best places to get around with the loading speed and other factors such as fixing title tags, Meta description, alt.tags and much more.
Reduce external script:
Using JavaScript codes for extra features to your website is the reason of getting HTTP requests for every time the page loads. And this is one of the reasons why your site is slowing down.
Take a look at the examples of external scripts-
- Pop-up boxes
- Facebook ‘like my page’ boxes
- Google analytics
- External comment and review section
The last note:
These are the basic steps you can consider initially to make your site load faster. However, it will not happen overnight. Make sure to check your website regularly. If you want to know more about anything related to the website, feel free to connect with our web experts at- vidinitechnology@gmail.com.