Page load speed affects marketing metrics such as conversion rates, sales revenue, and bounce rates. Most of your site visitors will only wait for up to three seconds for your page to load and bounce to a competitor’s site, thus reducing your traffic. Improving your site speed provides a great user experience that keeps your site visitors coming back. In this article, we’ll outline actionable tips for high website speed and optimal performance.
1. Monitor and test website performance
With the continuous advancement of technology, you don’t have to wait for your site traffic to go down to realize that something isn’t right. Regularly perform website speed tests to identify the areas slowing down your performance and the ones that need upgrading. These tests will also help you determine site scalability and responsiveness.
2. Choose a great hosting service
The best web hosts will provide you with improved site performance, security, increased uptime rates, and technical support. When choosing a service provider, study different hosts’ performance, features, and prices, and settle for the one that suits your business needs and budget.
3. Image optimization
Large image files slow site speed and performance. Image optimization helps increase website speed, improve SEO ranking, increase conversion rates for leads and sales, and provides fast website backup. The optimization process can be made easy by compression technology such as lossy and lossless. Tools and programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Tiny, PNG, Imageoptim, and GIMP can also help optimize images.
4. Reduce redirects
Redirects such as 301 and 302 increase page load time by making your site visitors wait longer for their responses. This may cause them to abandon your site leading to low conversion rates and SEO ranking. You can monitor these redirects using free checkers such as Google Page Speed, Redirect Mapper Tool, and Broken Requests tool. Below are a few tips you can use to reduce redirects:
- If you’re using WordPress for your website, choose redirect plugins
- Avoid linking a page that has redirects as it will frustrate your visitor
- Straightforward plugins that your site doesn’t need
- Scan your site regularly for any redirects
5. Reduce HTTP (hyperText transfer protocol) requests
It’s estimated that 80% of a page’s load time generates HTTP requests leading to low site speed. Reducing HTTP requests lowers bounce rates, improves SEO ranking, increases web traffic and conversion rates leading to more leads and sales.
You can reduce HTTP requests by:
- Fixing broken links
- Reducing redirects
- Combining CSS HTML and JavaScript files
- Deferring parsing of JavaScript
- Prioritizing file placement
- Using less external scripts.
- Reducing plugins
6. Browser caching
Browser caching involves storing temporary data in a reserved location to help sites, browsers, and apps load faster. As part of regular maintenance, ensure you clear your cache from time to time to maintain fast load speed.
Endnote
Good site speed and performance give your visitors a great user experience. Implementing the above tips will help you lower page load time and meet your marketing needs by boosting SEO, increasing traffic, and converting more leads and sales.