If Your site takes a few extra seconds to load it will leave a negative impact on your ability to engage visitors and make sales. It means having a fast site is essential — not just for ranking well on SERPs, but for keeping your profits and ROI high.
Most typical consumers expect websites to load in two to three seconds or less. So, if your site takes more than three seconds to load, you may lose almost half of your visitors before they even fully open your site. It’s proven that the faster sites earned almost double the revenue of sites that took more time to load.
Slow speed can affect many factors like user experience, bounce rate, search performance, and revenue. So, yes it’s true – Page speed matters! In this post, we’ll discover tips and best practices you can use to decrease sites’ loading time and improve site performance.
Optimize Images
Good quality decorative images can help enhance your web pages’ appearance and boost overall UX for your visitors. You can convert these high-quality images into the smallest possible file size without compromising quality with the help of Image optimization. There are many tricks and techniques that let you reduce the image’s file size and still keep them good enough to proudly display them on your website and improve your website’s performance.
Avoid Redirects
A redirect is a technique for moving visitors to a different Web page than the one they originally requested. If you avoid the use of redirects then you can serve your content significantly faster. Every time a 301 redirect is used, it forces the browser to a new URL which can affect your page speed in a noticeably bad way. You should consider this issue seriously and minimize the use of redirects to improve site performance.
Minification of JavaScript and CSS
When you minify CSS, HTML, and Javascript files, you can cut down some valuable time off of your site’s page load speed. It will minimize the amount of data being requested from the web server. If you compare your website loading speed after Minification, you will find that the sizes of your web pages and overall site speed have dramatically changed.
Reduce the number of HTTP Requests
Another way to improve the loading speed of your website is to reduce the number of HTTP requests. It will not only improve loading time, but it will dramatically improve overall user experience. Whether a user tries to access your website directly or clicks a link to it, the user’s web browser will automatically generate and send a series of HTTP requests to your site. Making fewer HTTP requests means you need to reduce how many elements load on your site. You can reduce HTTP requests by deleting or compressing images, consolidating CSS and JavaScript files, embedding videos, and activating browser caching.
Evaluate Plugins
Website speed not only depends on the number of installed plugins but also depends on their quality. These days, plugins are the most common components of each website. They add specific features, but the more plugins are installed, the more resources are needed to run them, which cost the website loading speed. Run the performance tests on your website and check which plugins load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries that slow down your website. Try to avoid them.
Increasing the speed at that your website loads can be incredibly beneficial in many ways. Using compression, limiting additional HTTP requests, minimum redirects, and enabling browser caching, are the top ways to improve your web server response time. Focus on these high-impact factors and take the necessary actions to get your website into shape. Contact Swayam Infotech for your web development project and schedule a meeting for a detailed discussion.