The Importance of Website Speed and How to Improve Yours

 

If you run or own a website, one question may cross your mind every now and then. How can I make my website faster? Perhaps it was when you last looked over your SEO reports and pondered if it was really that important to have fast site speeds?

It is important, and although there isn’t one single fix to boosting your website speed, there are plenty of adjustments you can make to get the results you want.

 

Why Is Website Speed So Important?

 

When talking about the need for website speed, there are a few things you have to consider. The first, and maybe most obvious reason to improve your website speed, is when thinking about how it affects your customers, clients, or readers. People can be impatient, even when loading a website. We want the things in our lives to be quick, convenient, and accessible. So if your website doesn’t load quickly a lot of users will close it.

The way that Google’s algorithm works, is the second thing to consider when looking at reasons you should improve website speed. Google has a preference for fast websites. They’re all about speed, likely to recommend a website that can get its users the most relevant information in the quickest amount of time. A slow website may indicate to Google a poor user experience.

With these two reasons in mind, you can see why it is crucial to ensure your website speed is the best it can be, not just to keep users on your website but to get them there in the first place.

 

How Slow Speeds can Impact Your Revenue

 

A slow website will restrict the number of visitors willing to stay long enough to become potential customers. Your revenue may be impacted by user drop off as your conversion rate declines.

Unfortunately, customers are less inclined to buy from you if your website runs slowly. With the assistance of a web development team, you can find ways to improve your website speed and optimize your mobile site.

 

How Can I Speed Up My Website?

 

There are plenty of options that a web management company can pursue in order to help improve your website speed. Most web management teams will begin by setting benchmarks for your website. This includes using specialty software to run speed tests for your website’s page.

This will determine exactly how fast your website currently runs. Once an average speed is established, the web management team will make a plan on how best to improve your website.

 

Optimizing Mobile Sites for Speed

 

A web page loading quickly has become the modern expectation for most internet users. With short attention spans and little patience, people now tend to get more frustrated the longer they have to wait. This has never been more prevalent than it is today, with most people using a smartphone as their go-to choice for internet browsing.

Optimizing your website for mobile use is the best way to ensure that it not only loads fast but offers a user-friendly experience. This is crucial when trying to beat your competition. Website drop-off rates on mobile devices occur most when your website fails to load quickly or is inaccessible.

A 1-second delay in average load times can result in an 8% increase in bounce rate and a 7% decrease in conversions. If your users won’t even wait for your website to load, what chance is there in converting them into customers?

 

Updating your website with a focus on mobile optimization is a great way to improve your overall website speed. Whether it be utilizing keyword terms to direct users to your website or ensuring that when they get there, they have a fast, mobile-friendly experience, mobile optimization will give your users more avenues to engage with your site and promote site conversion rates and growth.

 

Lower Page Weight

 

Page weight is the number of bytes required to load a page on your website. There is a weight for every asset on each page, and your overall page weight contributes to how swift your site load times are. The heavier your web page weight, the slower it will usually load. Web pages may be unnecessarily heavy due to oversized image files or a file being loaded multiple times.

Your site management team can find avenues to lower your page rate to improve your overall website speed. Image compression and minifying scripts are effective ways to reduce page weight and achieve other goals on the road to getting your website to run at peak speeds and performance.

 

Compressing Images to Improve Website Speed

 

A great first step that your web management team will go through is optimizing the images on your website. This easy-to-do task involves going through the images on your website and reducing their file size by compressing them. Through this process, your stunning images will retain their quality without the drawback of large file size. 

This means that your website won’t have to load as much content when your clients access them, improving your site's overall load times. The goal is to ensure that each page of your website should only require 1.5 to 6 megabytes of data to load.

 

Minifying Scripts To Increase Speed

 

When someone opens your website, it isn’t as simple as a single page being loaded for them but rather dozens if not hundreds of scripts and files being processed. These scripts work to ensure that your website functions correctly. With each script that is loaded, its processing time is reducing your website speed.

So the best way to reduce these load times while ensuring your scripts are working correctly is through a process called minifying.

Minifying is a difficult task that requires the skill of an experienced developer. They must ensure that while compressing the scripts for your website, they work safely to guarantee that nothing is broken during the process. Though this is a challenging task to do correctly, you’ll find that by minifying your scripts, there will be less of a strain to load your website and a boost in speed overall.

 

Utilizing Caching To Improve Load Times

 

By implementing a website cache, your website is basically storing a copy of itself in your user’s web browser. So after their first visit to your site, your users will have easy access on return visits as their browser loads the site from the cache. This eliminates the need for every file on your webpage to be loaded from your server. This process works wonders in improving your website speed.

So, first of all, you should focus on how to clear the cache.

 

Reducing Requests To Boost Efficiency

 

Another simple way to improve your website speed is to reduce the number of requests your website makes each time it loads. The browser your customers used to load your website makes requests to your website in order to get the data it needs. The fewer requests required, the faster your website will load. You should always strive to target less than 80 requests per page.

A web management team can help organize your required requests by combining resources, so they load together as one request. This process is called concatenation. A simple concept despite it being a big word, concatenation is the process of placing multiple strings of text together to form one single file.

This merger of files helps reduce the requests needed to load a web page and efficiently present your site at high quality without sacrificing speed.

You’ll also achieve this goal by avoiding landing page redirects. By taking these steps, as well as utilizing caching, you’ll find that your website will require fewer requests to load and run at quicker speeds.

 

Upgrade Hosting For Faster Speeds

 

It’s tough for old hosting sites to stand up against modern options. So if your hosting site is outdated, it may be time for an upgrade. You’ll find that today’s web development companies have access to a variety of new hosting options and can help you decide which one is the best choice for your website.

Regardless of the size of your website, upgrading to a new hosting site will not only help your website run fast and efficiently, but it will also offer accessibility and choice for future changes you may want to make.

 

Prioritizing Your Website’s Framework

 

Giving your website a chance to make a great first impression to new users goes a long way to reaching your conversion goals. The best way to do this is to not only ensure your website loads within 3 seconds of being opened but to make sure what your users see is relevant.

You can achieve both of these goals by optimizing your website to quickly load important visual content first while the rest of the site loads in the background. So, while your customer is reading the information they came for, your site will then focus on loading CSS and JavaScript files.

For your mobile site, pushing the focus on loading visual content above the fold first will give your users time to read as the rest of the page loads. Designing your website to prioritize what loads first is a surefire way to not only grab the attention of users but improve your site's overall speed.

 

So, What Does Your Website Need?

 

There are many reasons why your website may be running slower than it should. Whether it’s framework needs reorganization, your page weight is too heavy, or even if it's due for optimization, finding an expert team of web managers is your best way to find out what can be done and how best to do it. 

With faster website speeds, you not only improve your website's performance, but you also ensure you’re doing everything you can to boost conversions, broaden your reach and build an excellent customer experience. So, if you need assistance speeding up your website make sure you research the best developers to perform website optimization for a fantastic user experience.