Website speed is extremely crucial for enhancing user experience and SEO practices. Essentially, a website with a good loading speed helps it to rank well in search results. On the contrary, a slow website speed can increase the bounce rates and impact your business.
Thankfully, there are plenty of ways you can improve your website speed, from finding good website providers to optimizing the images, here are some tips to help you out
How to Check Website Speed?
Before we jump into ways to fix your website speed, it is important to know how to check the website loading time for your website. You can do so by simply taking a site speed test. There are plenty of websites out there that let you check that like Google Lighthouse or Cloudflare Observatory.
Tips to Fix Your Website Speed Problems
Based on the results obtained from the website speed test, here are a few tips to improve the loading speed of your website:
Choose Reliable Web Hosting Provider
The speed of your website largely depends on the kind of web hosting provider you have signed up with. Go for a high-performing web hosting NZ provider for they assure you with optimised servers and advanced infrastructure to support traffic spikes.
Minimise Redirects
Eliminate redirections wherever possible as they create unnecessary HTTPS that can impact the user experience and your SEO practices. Instead, opt for straightforward links to avoid unnecessary rendering of pages.
Clear Inactive Plug-Ins
Plug-ins are also a cause for slow website speed. While they do help boost certain content, piling them up can cause page crashes and data breaches. To improve your website speed it is important to prevent plug-ins from piling up by regularly cleaning them.
Optimise Images
Reducing the size of your images can also improve the loading speed of your website and the images can also be cached. This holds especially true for e-commerce websites as they run on a lot of images.
Lazy Loading of Images
Lazy Loading is a term used when a resource is loaded only when it appears in front of the user’s viewpoint. This method is executed to increase the website speed by deferring off-page images unless necessary.
Use Content Delivery System (CDN)
Another way to combat the slow website speed problem is by using a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDNs are designed to deliver digital content all across the globe by redirecting the user to the nearest server. This allows speedy access to content without increasing the buffer time.
Enable Caching
Caching is when certain information on the website such as images, logging information and more gets saved in a temporary space in your browser to enable faster loading when you re-visit the website.
This works great for frequent visitors to your website as they seamlessly access your website. Once they click on the website the elements are quickly downloaded and stored in their browser’s cache.
To Wrap Up!
Making improvements to your website is important to keep your users engaged and get better results for your business.
Choosing the right web hosting NZ provider, optimising images and enabling caching are tested ways in which you can fix your website speed.