Meta: Wondering how to speed up your business site? Take these 7 steps and you should see a noticeable improvement in your website speed.
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
Did you know that almost 70% of online shoppers say that website speed can change their willingness to buy from you? The first five seconds that someone lands on your site are the most important—and if your page isn’t loaded by then, you can say goodbye to 4% of customers for every extra second it takes.
Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to take steps to speed up your business site. Simple steps can make a huge difference, and they don’t take a lot of time to do. Implement these 7 steps, and you can expect to see a noticeable difference in your conversion rates.
1. Begin With A Speed Test
It’s always a good idea to do a speed test upfront. This will give you the data you need to see the difference after you’ve implemented these steps to speed up your business site.
You can do an accurate speed test using Pingdom or PageSpeed Insights. Once you know your own website speed, you’ll know, firstly, if you actually need to implement steps to speed it up, and secondly, just how much you need to improve it.
Doing this first and foremost sets you up to be able to compare your initial speed with your website speed after taking steps to improve it.
2. Check Your Plugin List
Most websites include certain plugins when you start them. It’s also likely that you’ll add your own as you build your website, but more often than not, you don’t end up using the full list of plugins that you have activated.
Plugins that you aren’t using can slow down your website. They take up space and memory, so getting rid of them can improve your website speed by quite a bit, depending on how many ”dead” plugins you have installed.
Go through your website’s plugins and remove any that aren’t actively being used. It’s a good idea to reassess the ones you are using and make sure they’re actually serving a valid purpose. If not, uninstall them too.
3. Check Your Website Redirects
Redirects can build up over time. This happens when you redesign or rebrand and end up restructuring your website. Pages that used to be located in one place get moved, and to avoid confusion, you set the old URL to redirect to the new one.
The problem is these chains of URLs can take extra seconds to work through. When you’ve got multiple redirects across your website and users are moving through your web pages, this can slow down their experience.
Google also isn’t a big fan of redirects, so if your website has a lot of them, it could negatively affect your ranking as well. Use a redirect or broken link tool like Screaming Frog to find and fix them.
4. Compress All Images
Do you know how many images you have on your website? The larger the images on your page, the longer it takes to load them, which could cause impatient visitors to leave before the page is done.
Depending on how many images you have, you could save between 250KB and 1MB per website page by just compressing them. We advise going through your existing library and compressing every image. This will take some time, but when you consider how much difference it can make to your page, it’s worthwhile doing.
From there, get into the habit of compressing every new image before uploading it to your website. There are plenty of free image compression tools online.
5. Enable “Browser Caching”
Browser caching is a handy feature that allows the browser to store information such as JavaScript files, image data, and website themes. The next time someone lands on your site using that browser, it doesn’t need to load everything from the server—it loads all of those elements directly from the browser.
This can save a good bit of time when it comes to how quickly your web page loads. It’s a small shortcut, but can make a significant difference in your page load times! It’s as easy as installing a browser caching plugin on your website.
6. Make Content Delivery Easier
Hosting your downloadable files on a CDN—content delivery network—can save you seconds. If you get lots of visitors from countries other than your own, the CDN directs them to a server close to their location, which cuts down on download time by quite a bit.
As well as hosting your files on a CDN, we highly recommend hosting videos on an external platform like YouTube. They take up a huge amount of space and you can simply embed them on your pages instead of uploading them on your site.
7. If All Else Fails… Check Your DNS Provider & Web Host
This is probably the biggest step, but it’s something you can look at after everything else is done. If your website is still slow after implementing all the above changes, we recommend switching to a faster DNS provider or changing to a web host that’s optimized for performance.
A DNS—domain name server—is where your IP address and corresponding URL is stored. When this provider is slow, it can tack seconds onto your page loading time without you even realizing it.
Cheaper web hosts often share resources between multiple sites, leading to a much slower load time. You may want to upgrade to private hosting so you aren’t sharing resources with any other sites.
Switching these two up to providers who are more focused on performance and speed could be the final key to improving your website speed.
Conclusion
Your website speed is your first impression of a new visitor. If it’s slow, there’s a high chance that they’ll bounce before they even get to see what you’re offering. On the other hand, if it’s speedy, you’ve already started off on the right foot and can then focus on converting them to a customer.
Considering more than half of visitors abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you can’t afford to neglect your website speed! It’s not difficult to take most of these steps, so begin implementing them today to see a significant difference.
About the Author
Paul Wheeler is a web design specialist who runs an agency dedicated to helping small business owners optimize their most important asset—their website. He shares information, comparisons, and detailed reviews over at Reviews for Website Hosting.
