It takes no mind of a genius to realize that a website’s speed is extremely important these days.
It matters for the user because it directly affects their experience on the site. Therefore, it also matters for you as a website owner because you want your visitors to be satisfied.
It must be easy to guess WHY people enjoy fast-loading sites. You must’ve browsed the web at some point in your life to notice a difference:
Slow sites take too much of our time.
They make us grow impatient and give us an urge to throw our computer out the window. When it comes to the internet, we want fast results and we want them right now.
Fast websites seem more professional and satisfactory.
Given two sites that offer an equally fine product, the one on a faster site will sell considerably better.
Having all that in mind, you’ll probably want to hear the answer we promised at the very beginning. How did we manage to increase the traffic of one of our sites by 200 per cent?
Ways to Increase Your Traffic by 200%
The website in question is Slotsify, if you want to check it out. We have used a number of strategies for increasing its loading times and boosting the user’s experience.
With all of these results combined, we finally got the impressive result. It’s important to note that all the methods are fairly important. However, we couldn’t get such a huge boost by using any one of them alone.
So, the methods we used (and, therefore, you should too) are:
- Optimising and compressing the images
- Cleaning and improving the code
- Optimising the database in CMS
- Removing trash data, dead links and errors
- Removing the plugins that you don’t need
- Avoid using web fonts
- Prefetching for the win
Optimisation in More Detail
For example, images are a huge factor in the page’s loading speed, especially if you have many. They often comprise the majority of data size on a web page, thus reducing their size is critical.
You can do it by choosing a lighter file format, compressing them and checking if their size isn’t larger than necessary.
Shortening the code as much as possible helps too. If it’s efficient and requires as few cycles as possible, your page will take less time to generate itself.
If you’re on WordPress, we suggest you use one of the CMS optimisation programmes too. It will improve sites which use Content Management Systems. They often have loads of plugins, which should be limited to a minimum number.
Finally, use one of the prefetching techniques. For that, you need to know where your user will go to, though. If you do, this method will allow to preload data before a visitor asks for it, drastically decreasing the waiting time.
Why Does This Work?
You may not see the 200% increase in traffic right away. However, with time it will definitely increase because people love fast response. It’s all the truer today, as internet users are notorious for short attention spans.
So, check every corner of your website and you’ll enjoy faster speed, improved user feedback and, eventually, more conversions.