No one wants to wait around for something. Waiting in line to buy groceries, put gas, or even just buy some food at Mcdonald’s or other fast food restaurants. Waiting for something sucks.
The same applies to websites. If you have a website, and it is slow to appear for your website visitors, those same visitors will no longer go to your website. They’ll spend less time reading and clicking around because it takes so long to load.
Data has shown, on an average Ecommerce site, for every second above 2 that it takes to load a website fully, your conversion ratio will drop by 7%. That is actual money being left on the table.
Our web development team compiled a few quick tips on how to speed up your website. Below are the top 3 we came up with, which also apply to our websites.
1 – Caching
When you cache elements of a page, it means a static page is generated. What does that mean? It means your website pages no longer need to connect to your database whenever someone looks at them.
We’ve found the typical caching mechanism can speed up your website by up to 50%. That means a website that takes 2 seconds to load, on average, can load in under 0.8 seconds after enabling caching.
Page caching is the easiest thing to set up, as most caching plugins will work right out of the box.
2 – Optimization
If you have a lot of images on one page, it means you have too many on one page. Images usually cause pages to load very slowly, as browsers tend to load the entire page instead of image by image.
Large images should be optimized for the web. This means compressing them using WordPress plugins or online services that exist. Most website images should not exceed 100kb and only 3 to 5 per page. This will give your website a solid speed boost and give visitors more reasons to click around.
3 – Review 3rd party trackers and links
The last reason most websites can load slowly is due to 3rd party trackers and scripts. For example, every time your website visitor loads a page on your website, it can connect to Google Analytics, chat services, trackers, and other sometimes useful tools.
If you have too many connections to external resources, this will affect your site’s page loading speed since each external resource needs to load first, and then your own page will load.
Make sure you review how many external resources you’re using.
Lastly, choosing the right web hosting provider is extremely important, as server optimization, plenty of resources, and good support can go a long way when trying to speed up your website. The hosting provider you select plays a significant role in the performance, reliability, and security of your website. Our top choice for 2023 is Skystra, which came on top in our latest WordPress hosting provider review.
We hope these tips help your website load faster!
