In order to survive in this competitive online marketplace, having just a beautiful website design is not sufficient. Apart from its aesthetic appeal, you need to take care about its performance as well. Waiting is quite irritating and this applies to the online world as well. People hate to wait, and therefore reducing the loading speed of your website has become one of the most important things to do. It’s not only about optimizing the website for SEO, but it’s about optimizing the user’s experience with your website which is even more important.
According to the surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com – nearly half of web users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. They abandon a site that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. So, how can you assure that your website loads faster?
Here are the 4 Reasons Why Your Website Should Be Responsive
Check out the following 5 ways that will help you to reduce the page loading speed of your website:
- Image Optimization: Larger images can greatly affect the loading speed of your website. So, it’s always a good idea to scale down your images before uploading them. There are several online tools as well that help you compress your images such as tinypng.com. Such software can reduce the size of your images dramatically without affecting its quality.
- Browser Caching: Enabling browser caching on your website lets you temporarily store some of the browsing data on your visitors’ system. This loads your website faster when those visitors visit your website again, enhancing their experience. How long the data remains stored on the users’ system depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings. You can contact your hosting company to set up browser catching or you can use the following resources:
- Apache Caching
- IIS Caching
- Nginx Caching
- Compression: Compressing the files of your website reduce your page size, save bandwidth and speed up page load times. It can reduce the size of upto 50 – 70% of your HTML and CSS files, which means your visitors will not have to download this data, speeding up your website’s performance. Compression is a server-side setting, and therefore how you implement it depends on your web server and its settings. Contact your hosting provider to get more information on this.
Does Web Design Layout Affect SEO?
- Optimizing CSS: Optimize your CSS to remove the extra, unnecessary code in your website design and give your site visitors quick access to your pages. Minimize your CSS files to remove extra spaces in your stylesheets and ensure your file is at its smallest size. Some CMS already provides the option to minimize CSS files. If your CMS doesn’t provide this option, you can use a free online service like csscompressor. To use it, simply paste in your CSS Source Code and press “Compress”. Your stylesheet will be minimized.
- Use Plugins to the Minimum: Plugins are the readymade functions that can handle about any task, such as managing social media posts, providing help with SEO and more. However, these plugins add up to the file size, which negatively impacts page load times. Therefore, it’s recommended to keep the plugins to the minimum and delete the ones that aren’t too helpful to improve your website performance.
Know Why Professional Company Does Not Like To Use Template To Create Website?
Well, if you are not sure about whether your website performs well or not, you can test it using the Google’s tool here. It offers useful insights on where your website design is lagging in terms of performance and how can you fix it.