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First, let’s have a little experiment. Go to web page test and conduct a website speed test. Was the website load not up to the mark? Then this article is for you.
In this impatient, fast-paced world, letting your audience wait for your website to load is impacting your conversion rates. This doesn’t only have an instantaneous effect such as lost sales opportunities from those who chose to abandon the site, but the high bounce rates would push the site’s ranking downwards, hurting your future conversion rates.
Because of the increasing number of active mobile users, making sure that your website is optimized for mobile screens and searches is important. It’s an understatement to say that page load speed should be a part of your search engine optimization checklist.
In light of this, let's take a look at five easy ways to make your pages load faster.
Compress and optimize your images:
Images help enhance the appearance of your web pages and increase the quality of your content. However, large images can also delay loading times.
Therefore, one of the easiest ways to increase page loading speeds is to compress and optimize your images. This can include changing their file formats, compressing images through lossy or lossless compression and enabling lazy loading.
By reducing your images' file sizes, you can reduce their ‘weight', ultimately helping your pages load more quickly. Optimize your images, but don’t destroy the image quality, as you want small image files but you also want to have a professional-looking website.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests:
When visiting a new web page, most of the page-loading time is spent downloading components of that page (e.g. images, stylesheets, and scripts). By minimizing the number of requests a web page needs to make, it will load faster.
To reduce HTTP requests for images, one thing you can do is to use CSS sprites to combine multiple images. If you have multiple stylesheets and JavaScript libraries, consider combining them to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Put Stylesheet References at the Top and Script References at the Bottom:
Moving your stylesheet references to the "<head>" of your HTML document helps your pages feel like it is loading faster because doing so allows your pages to render the styles progressively.
Browsers can only download two components per hostname at the same time. If you add your scripts towards the top, it would block anything else below it on the initial loading of the page. This makes it feel like the page is loading slower. To avoid this situation, place script references as far down the HTML document as possible, preferably right before the closing "<body>" tag.
Place JavaScript and CSS in External Files:
If your JavaScript and CSS are directly in your HTML document, they are downloaded every time an HTML document is requested. This, then, doesn’t take advantage of browser caching and increases the size of the HTML document. Always place your CSS and JavaScript in external files; it’s a best practice and makes your site easier to maintain and update.
Clean up your media library and database:
Over time, it’s very likely that your media library has been cluttered with old images or unused images. This just clogs up your website. Clean up your media library by deleting unnecessary images and other media files for faster average page load times.
Similar to your media library, your database can become bloated over time with unused information like photos and files. Identify and eliminate unwanted data and unused content from your database. In turn, this helps your web hosting server to fetch requested information more efficiently.
Page load time is an essential factor in how customers interact with your site, how easily visitors convert into customers, and how easily your site ranks organically. These simple tips will uplevel your website from slow to best-in-class.
But if you want more information on decreasing your website’s page load times, read Google’s section on page speed, which provides tools, articles, and community feedback regarding website speed.