How to Speed up Your Website: A Complete Guide

These days, customers will form an opinion of your company based on how quickly they can access your website. First impressions are lasting impressions when it comes to user experience. One of the most distressing things that can happen to your products, and ultimately your brand, is slow loading speeds. Therefore, it is essential to take significant steps to improve website speed.

A one-second delay results in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Loading times have a direct influence on marketing and sales efforts; therefore, cutting them down is a win-win. Read on for Growth Jockey’s tips to speed up your website and make it run more smoothly.

Why is Website Speed so Crucial?

Websites that are slow to load can lose both money and credibility. Before understanding how to improve your website pages, here are some impacts slow web page speed can have on your business.

• Customer Conversion

Conversion rate is affected by site speed, according to a number of studies. Sites that load quickly attract and retain more visitors, and their visitors convert faster than those that take longer to load. Several businesses have discovered that even a millisecond or two saved in website load time results in a noticeable increase in conversions:

1. Walmart found that a one-second improvement in page load time resulted in a 2% increase in conversions.

2. After decreasing webpage load time in half, online retailer AutoAnything witnessed a 12-13% boost in overall sales.

As a result, optimisation strategies for increasing conversion rates often focus on enhancing the functionality of a website.

• SEO Practices and Visibility

Site performance is a major element in Google search results because Google places emphasis on providing visitors with fast access to relevant information. An optimised site for portable devices is a priority for search engine optimisation.

An underperforming website provides an unpleasant experience for visitors and is hence less likely to rank well in organic search results. Google's search results for desktop users have also begun to reflect the mobile-friendly nature of websites from December 2017. Google made this decision to safeguard visitors against slow and non-responsive websites.

• Bounce Rate

The percentage of individuals who visit a website that depart after seeing a single page is known as the bounce rate. If a website fails not to respond within a few seconds, users will most likely close the browser window or click away. When the loading time of a website is between one and three seconds, the chance of a bounce rate of just 32% is achieved.

A high-performing website will have a more significant number of repeat visitors, a lower percentage of bounces, more conversions, more engagement, a higher position in organic search results, and a more positive user experience overall.

How to Speed Up your Website

Can you find yourself wondering, "How do I fix a slow website speed?" Some things that developers may do to make a website fast are as follows:

• Assess site performance

A website's performance may be measured by doing a speed test. Maintaining a regular website test schedule may provide developers with invaluable data about any slowdowns or speedups in the site's performance. You can improve website speed in many places, and developers can find out what those places are by doing a speed test.

There are a plethora of free, high-quality site speed assessments available. You may run several speed tests on WebPageTest.org without spending a dime, and the results will show you exactly how long it takes for each component of your website to load.

In addition, Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights for doing in-depth performance analysis. The Network tab of Google Chrome's DevTools displays all HTTP requests, the size of the requested files, and the time it takes for requests to be completed, all of which may assist developers in evaluating their site's efficiency.

• Leverage a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of servers located in different parts of the world that work together to provide users' requests for online content regardless of where they happen to be located.

When a website is hosted on a single server, queries from all users are directed to the same piece of hardware. As a result, it takes longer to complete each request. Moreover, consumers have longer load times when they are geographically remote from the server. Requests from users are automatically sent to the closest server using CDN. The end result is a faster-loading website and faster delivery of information to users. Therefore, it is beneficial to boost your website speed with a CDN.

• Upgrade your Web Host

Hosts may choose from the following three options:

1. Host sharing

2. Colocation on Virtual Private Servers

3. In-house server

To host a website, the most common method is to utilise a shared server. That is the quickest and least expensive approach to getting your website up and running. Choosing a web host with a high-speed connection is crucial for SEO. When using shared hosting, your site will share the server's resources with the other sites hosted there. The primary factor why shared hosting is slower than VPS or dedicated hosting is because of this very issue.

There is a noticeable speed boost when switching to a virtual private server or a dedicated server. Virtual Private Servers (VPS) distribute data over many servers. With a virtual private server (VPS), you may share a physical server with multiple users while maintaining the isolation of their data and settings. VPS is the best option if your website receives moderate traffic or if it is an eCommerce site that experiences traffic surges at certain times.

A dedicated server, which might be your personal physical server, is the most premium hosting option to increase the website performance. In this scenario, you will need to rent a server and pay for the services of a network administrator to keep it running well.

We at Growth Jockey help analyse your webpage traffic and server needs and suggest a plan that may best develop your website speed.

• Image Optimisation

Images have a significant role in the success of online stores. A high number of photographs, images, and graphics on the product pages increases interaction. The downside of using images is that they are typically quite big files that cause a website to load slowly.

Considering that images account for about 75% of the total page weight on most websites, it is essential to check that they are showing properly and not slowing the page down, particularly considering that a one-second load delay makes webpage view drop by 11%. In certain cases, picture compression alone is not enough.

At Growth Jockey, we provide image optimisation tools where we were able to considerably reduce the average load time of your web page's pictures. To further reduce the file size of photographs, we go the additional mile and remove all embedded EXIF data.

• Condense your CSS and JavaScript

The process of "minifying" code entails erasing any non-essential components, including comment threads, whitespace, and semicolons, so that it may be executed more quickly and more efficiently by a computer.

This reduces the size of the JavaScript and CSS files, making them more efficient to load on the web and using less bandwidth.

In and of itself, minification offers only marginal gains in performance. However, if you combine it with the other suggestions above, your website's performance will improve significantly.

• Cut Down on HTTP Requests

In order to load a page's pictures, scripts, and style sheets, the browser must make several HTTP requests. In reality, several of these requests will be needed by various sites.

The time it takes for a web page to load might increase if it makes many requests to various servers to get various resources. When a website relies on resources from many servers, performance issues or page failure may occur if any of those sites have technical difficulties.

Given these caveats, it is best to limit the number of resources that each web page needs to load. In addition, a speed test may reveal specific HTTP requests using your server's resources. For instance, if a page's load time is very long due to pictures, programmers might seek a more efficient image hosting provider.

How can Growth Jockey assist in accelerating your website speed?

These days, the average user has a three-second endurance for waiting for a web page to load. In the event that this standard is not met, a significant amount of website visitors and, by extension, income will be lost. If you are thinking, "How to increase the speed of my website?" you have come to the right place.

Listed below are some of the strategies we use to improve your website's performance:

• Inspect and assess the primary determinants of a website's success, such as conversion, exposure, and usability.

• Analyse your site's current speed, load time, and page load times, and prioritise improving those three areas.

• Initiate with the weakest parts of your site and prioritise the pages that have the most impact on your conversion rate.

At Growth Jockey, we are passionately committed to developing customised solutions that effectively address the key challenges faced by our clients across diverse industries. Regardless of the size of your company, whether it's a small-scale enterprise or a large corporation, you can now tap into the benefits of advanced web development. Take a decisive step towards unlocking the next level of growth for your brand by contacting us today!