Even a delay by just one second can hurt your conversion rate and send your targets to competitors, which is why page speed is all-important in your SEO efforts. With a fast-loading website, you’ll not only move up in your SEO rankings, but you’ll also gain more customers and better conversions. If you want to boost the way you run your business, follow these steps to make your page speed impressively fast:
Simplify Website Design
Website design can increase or decrease your site speed, so you must take this into consideration. Consider the following:
- An HTTP request consists of different elements on your website, including images, CSS and JavaScript that make requests for your website to load.
- A simple website design reduces the number of HTTP requests needed for your site pages, making them load faster.
- A simple website design is more visually appealing than complicated layouts that are difficult to navigate through.
- Simple website designs make it easier for viewers to perform your desired call to action with minimal confusion.
Designing your website shouldn’t be about adding layers of complexities, especially if your focus is on b2b web design. Viewers are time poor and want the most user-friendly experience, which is why simple website designs work best by loading faster.
Remove Plugins You Don’t Need
Plugins and add-ons that aren’t needed on your website should be removed because they can slow down web page speeds considerably. Consider the following:
- Avoid plugins with a lot of styles and scripts because they take longer to load.
- Remove plugins that have plenty of remote requests because they cause delays in responses, which impacts your web page speed.
- Remove plugins that request for extra database queries to different pages on your website.
It’s important for you to understand that it isn’t about the number of plugins on your website but the quality. A website with more plugins can load faster than a website with fewer, low quality plugins. While plugins do enhance functionality, make sure you keep only the important ones that are necessary.
Reduce Response Time Of Server
One of the biggest factors in page load speeds is the server response time. The less time a server takes to respond, the faster your web page will load. When a user types your website into the browser, a DNS server finds the IP address associated with the URL. Consider the following:
- Make sure your web host has enough resources to handle the traffic you get to your website. Fewer resources mean that server response times are longer because it cannot handle too many users within a specified period.
- Choose a good web server to make sure it is in keeping with your website requirements, including traffic, design and industry.
- Optimise your web server to your specific needs to get the best response possible.
- Make sure your database is able to retrieve data efficiently to speed up page load times because slow queries causes server response time delays.
Your goal is to load your web pages as quickly as possible, which is why you cannot afford to ignore your server response time, even if it isn’t the actual cause of the slow down.
Limit Social Sharing Buttons And Remove Broken Links
Many businesses mistakenly assume that the more social sharing buttons they have, the more visibility they can get. But social sharing buttons can sometimes cause delays in your page load times, which is detrimental. Consider the following:
- Too many social sharing buttons confuses readers, and may cause them to leave your website without any clear action.
- Many social sharing buttons incorporate JavaScript, which can hamper performance speed.
- Outages on social media sites can impact the speed of websites that have installed share buttons to them.
- Remove broken links because they can create a bad user experience and can sometimes slow down your page load times.
The best way to combat social media issues is to keep only the most relevant sharing buttons and remove any broken links so that your website speed is optimal at all times.
Today’s Internet user doesn’t have the time to wait for website pages to load. The expectation is that websites open with lightning speed and anything else is unacceptable. If you don’t find ways to speed up your web pages, you could lose out to competition. Follow these steps to improve your page load speeds.
Tina Johnson helped bring The Marketing Folks from a-weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. She continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a contributor to The Marketing Folks, Tara mainly covers industry new.
