Tips For Speeding Up Your Website

• By Sarah
• General News
• 1648 Views
• 24th August 2022

One of the most important factors in retaining website customers and converting visits into sales is the site loading speed. Research shows that 40% of web users will click away from a site that takes three or more seconds to load, and almost half expect a site to load in two seconds.

So, if your site is slow and clunky, that’s a major barrier to the success of your business. The problem doesn’t just start with the customer journey, either. Google now incorporates site loading speeds into its search engine ranking system, so a sluggish site means that it will rank below your rivals, no matter how good your products or customer service is. 

When US retail Walmart invested in upgrading the loading times of its pages, it found that for every one second of speed improvement, a 2% increase in conversions was logged. Conversely, one extra second of loading time can lead to a 25% dip in conversion rates.

So, what can be done to optimise site loading speeds? One of the first steps you should take is to minimise HTTP requests. There is no need to have an in-depth technical level of knowledge to have a general understanding of how HTTP requests work, and how they affect the performance of your website. 

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and you will have noticed it at the beginning of a web address. It is how the browser communicates with the server, and it is used to download data such as images, scripts, and stylesheets. The more HTTP requests that a site makes, the slower the page loading speed is likely to be.

If the requests and responses are encrypted, then this is signified by the term ‘secure’ being added to the end, which is called HTTPS. The volume of HTTPS requests that a site makes is primarily affected by the coding. A bespoke site which has been coded by a professional web developer will have highly streamlined code that is optimised for fast loading speeds.

However, an amateur website that is built from a template may have bulky code and obsolete pages that are slowing down the loading times. If you have used a platform such as WordPress to build your website, then you can use plugins which allow you to combine CSS and Javascript files, such as WP Rocket.

This concentrates the files into smaller groups to allow them to load faster. You can also minify files, which removes unnecessary spaces and comments from static files, allowing the browser to process them faster. 

Carry out a review of your plug-ins, and remove any that are non-essential or obsolete. Some plug-ins allow you to combine all your social media links into one file, so that might be worth exploring if you have multiple profiles which are linked to your site. 

Finally, optimise all your image sizes, so they are only as big as they need to be to display clearly, remove any unnecessary information in the databases, and make sure you are running the latest version of the coding language or CMS that you use.

 

If you are looking for a white label WordPress agency, please talk to us today.