The speed of your website matters, it plays a major role in the growth of your online business. It has an impact on your page views, conversions and definitely, customer satisfaction. Although the load time recommended by experts is 3 seconds (most ideal would be 2 seconds), a lot of websites have not really been able to follow suit.
In the year 2018, speed update by Google made people more serious about website optimization. The speed of websites are going to get even quicker and the slower ones will only have to see themselves losing, the only way out is to step into the race and truly blend in. Having a fast site for your business is important, not just to achieve a perfect rank with Google but also to gain long term benefits.
Decide on the best web host
Firstly, find the best hosting provider that your brand deserves. This should be foremost because you will have a hard time implementing the following points without a good web host. Do your research, keep an eye on the basics like quality of service, speed and uptime. The hosting provider has its own major role because if you don’t get enough server resources, even the most basic website would seem difficult to run. The web host that is good for another website is not necessarily good for yours.
Cut down on HTTP Request
About 80% of a website’s page load time is determined by the time that goes into loading various components such as images, scripts and stylesheets. An HTTP request gets made for every element or component; the more the elements on the page, the more time it takes to render. Begin this activity by finding out how many request your site makes, so that the number can act as your benchmark.
Polishing your SEO Practices
It has been indicated by Google that the site speed (eventually, page speed) is one of the signals that the algorithm uses in order to determine page ranking of websites. The actual measure of time to first byte may just be a requisite to determining the page speed of a website. Also work on reducing your redirects and fuel your offline and online business visibility.
Optimization of images
Image optimization is an integral step to improving website speed. This may not seem to be a complicated topic but properly optimizing your image can speed up your website by 70% . When webmasters upload an image to their site and simple utilize the width parameter to alter the image size, a problem gets created. The image appears physically smaller, however, the file size remains the same. This means that the browser still has to download the full image and then resize the same. This could also mean that the client will have to go through downloading megabytes worth of files to obtain kilobytes of content.
Platforms like Photoshop will help you optimize for web, set the desired image size and thus reduce your loading time. Moreover, remember to optimize images separately for mobile and desktop viewing.
Pick a CDN
The working of a Content Delivery Network is similar to that of server caching. For example, if your server is in Asia but you get a lot of traffic from Europe, CDN helps you store static content on a server in Europe. It thus helps you in delivering content or information to remote audiences. It also helps in balancing out the traffic of a website, in case it gets too much at any given point.
Compress with GZIP
Released in 1992 but relevant nevertheless , GZIP is a set of codes that merges into the .htaccess file of your website. It then detects the redundancies in your code; GZIP helps in reducing the size of the HTTP response by shortening the codes that take time to load.
Be it offline or online business, it is good to make your presence felt in a way that it gets remembered. Therefore, start building your website speed with these simple steps and move your way upward. Improve your revenue and engagement at the same time. Goodluck.
