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Nowadays, people expect web pages to load in less than three seconds.
Imagine the frustration of the user when your website loads in more than 5 seconds or more!
Site speed directly affects your website’s success. Customers can leave your website if it takes too long to load. That is why every website owner needs to know how to improve a slow site speed.
Optimizing your website for speed is the best investment.
There are plenty of ways to improve page load time and ensure your customers stay engaged with your brand.
You should always partner with top London SEO agencies to make sure you are using the right strategies and tools to improve site speed.
5 Best Ways to Improve Slow Site Speed
1. Optimize Images
Images are the largest contributors to slow website speed. Images make up about 65% of the total bytes on a webpage. They may include heavy images such as photos and videos and images with a high resolution whose file size is larger than it needs to be.
Typically, images are the biggest culprits when it comes to slowing down your site. Optimizing images is one of the easiest ways to improve the speed of your website. If your site is not fast, it is likely because you have a lot of images that are taking a long time to load.
Again, to optimize images, remove unnecessary information from your photos, including location data or camera settings, such as EXIF metadata. You can do this using free tools such as JPEGmini or TinyPNG.
Also, optimize photo compression by adjusting compression levels in your photo editor — this will ensure that your image doesn’t look bad even after getting compressed into a smaller file size. You can also use a number of image optimization plugins to increase your website speed.
2. Reduce the Number of Redirects
A redirect is when a browser requests one URL and receives another URL in response. Reducing the number of redirects on your website can greatly improve your site speed and user experience.
Redirects can be very useful, especially when you are using them with a content management system with many different versions of the same page. They can also be very dangerous because each redirect adds another layer to the process.
If you have many redirects on your site, it’s important to check for duplicates or unnecessary redirects that could get removed.
For example, if you have a website whose domain name ends in .com and another whose domain name ends in .org and there is no reason for this, these two sites should remain merged.Â
3. Eliminate Unnecessary Plugins and Scripts
Check your website’s plugin list. Some plugins may be slowing your site down without you even realizing it. If there are any you don’t use anymore, disable.
The more plugins you install on your site, the slower it will be. The same goes for scripts (such as JavaScript). These extra elements add an extra layer of code that needs to get loaded into the browser before displaying on the screen. It slows download times for every single person who visits your site.
Here are the two most common types of plugins that slow down your site:
Analytics plugins
Google Analytics and other analytics tools are essential for measure performance of your site and analyzing traffic patterns.
However, if you don’t need all the features they offer, consider using lighter alternatives like Piwik or Simple Analytics for WordPress. These plugins use fewer resources than traditional analytics tools and don’t add unnecessary bloat to your website.
Social media plugins
Social media plugins display social sharing buttons on your website, which increases page load time because they load content from external domains like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. You can replace these with static links instead, which will not slow down your site!
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The best way to improve slow site speed is to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers that deliver your website’s files to users. It works by storing copies of your site’s pages, images, and other media on servers worldwide.
When someone visits your website, they’re routed to the server closest to them. Such helps reduce page load times because it takes less time for data to travel between the user and the server.
A CDN can also make it easier to scale up as your traffic grows. Since multiple servers are hosting copies of your site’s files, you don’t have to worry about upgrading your dedicated server or adding more storage space if you start getting more visitors than expected.
5. Use Caching Plugins
Caching plugins are a great way to speed up your website without coding or editing.
Such speeds up page load times and reduces the amount of stress placed on your server, making it easier for your website to handle spikes in traffic without crashing or slowing down.
A caching plugin allows you to create an offline copy of your website so that users don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your site.
Such can help you save money on hosting because the server does not have to spend extra time and resources loading pages that people have already seen before.
There are many different caching plugins available on the market today. Still, WP Super Cache is one of the most popular options out there right now because it’s easy to set up and configure and offers good performance at no cost, although there is also a paid premium version.
In Summary
Slower business websites mean fewer conversions and more time for your visitors to get bored and leave. Fortunately, there are some things you can do today to improve your site speed and help your users have a better experience on your site.
If all of the above performance tips seem overwhelming to you, don’t worry. You don’t need to implement all of them right away. Just focus on one or two at a time.
The key to improving site speed is making these changes over several months. If a site’s fast, your customers will be coming back for more!
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