Tha hallmark of a good website is an excellent page speed. With the world becoming faster than ever, people’s attention span has shrunk. Nobody’s going to wait over 2 seconds for a website to open. If you have a slow website, then its likely that you are losing 80 to 90 percent of your traffic. Page speed is one of the best reasons which can help you to increase website traffic.
Just take a look at your Google Analytics. Google has officially declared page loading speed as a ranking factor, so there is no excuse left to ignore it. In this post, you’ll find tips to improve page speed for drawing more traffic and conversions.
Web Hosting
Usually, when someone launches a website, they aim for the lowest hosting cost and end up using shared hosting. Shared hosting, as the name suggests is shared by more than one website, which is bound to bring the speed of your website down. When you plan to start with a website, prepare a budget for a full hosting package. That should be your priority. There are plenty of hosting sites that offer affordable hosting packages, but we recommend before diving in, do good research, check out reviews and ratings.
Enable GZIP Compression
Enabling compression will help reduce the time it takes for your website to load on a web-browser. Using GZIP for compression will reduce the HTML, CSS, JavaScript files making them smaller when the website is loading. But after the site loads into the browser, the files will decompress on its own. All modern browsers support GZIP compression, so you need not worry about that. Try to look up for how to enable GZIP compression on Google. We are sure you’d find tons of tutorials telling you what exactly you need to do.
Minify Resources
Minifying JavaScript and CSS files mean basically removing comments and white spaces that are not really necessary in order to reduce the file size. This does not mean that comments are deleted or that the theme altered. Minifying resources with plugins will help WordPress reduce the CSS and JavaScript files when the site or page is loading without making any changes to the original file. Three of the most popular caching plugins are W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket. The first two being free, you can definitely give these a try.
Optimize Media
Images are one of the biggest culprits in bringing the speed of a website down. It’s easy to take care of this problem. All you need to do is reduce the size of the image. Instead of using too many plugins, we recommend using free websites like Kraken.io, Compressor.io, etc. to reduce the size of the image file before uploading into your website. Avoid using PNG files because they tend to be heavier than say JPEG files.
Use CDN
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an excellent way to reduce the loading speed of a website. It stores a static version of your site and then when someone accesses your site, the visitor is provided a copy from the nearest server to his/her location. There are plenty of free services available but we’d recommend going for a paid one because they tend to be far better and more useful.
Any other tip you think will help reduce website speed dramatically and help increasing conversions? Share with us.
Leave a Reply