By 
We’ve all fallen victim to a slow website at some point. You click on a link and patiently wait for it to load. You may even hit refresh a few times to help it along. After a while you get tired of waiting, close the window and return to your browsers search results.
You could blame our modern culture of instant gratification or shorter attention spans. But the reality of the matter is when someone clicks on a website link they expect it to load.
What Is Website Speed About?
Website speed is the measurement of how fast your website loads when someone clicks on your URL. It’s also an essential part of the user experience because faster websites mean happy visitors. Happy visitors become happy customers and are more likely to visit your website again.
Everything You Need To Know About Rankings and Website Speed
In the world of digital marketing a slow website can have a terrible effect on your business. Not only does a slow load time cause people to leave your site, it negatively affects your website traffic. It also drags down your overall ranking on search engines.
In 2010 Google announced that they would be taking website speed into consideration for ranking purposes.For digital marketers this means you have to pay extra attention to your website speed.
If your site takes more than a minute to load, it will adversely affect your rankings. But when you examine the factors that cause website load speeds and response times to be slow, you will notice that it’s rather easy to fix. It’s all about creating a clean website that’s not filled with messy code, flashy graphics and giant images.
How to Fix A Slow Website?
Websites with a slow loading time are penalized by Google. This has a terrible effect on your website traffic and causes you search engine ranking to drop.The best way to prevent this penalty is by testing your website speed so you can start optimizing it through SEO. There are lots of different ways to improve your website speed. Here are some of the most effective methods.
- Content Delivery Network
All websites have a global reach which means people will be visiting your website from all around the world. But the location or origin of your website and the proximity to a user could have an effect on speed. To optimize speed for users from different places you can set up your website on a content delivery network. This system houses your website in more than one location. So when user clicks on your website it will be loaded from a location closest to them.
- Choose A Good Hosting Provider
When deciding which company should host your website you need to examine the services they offer. Available bandwidth, guaranteed up-time (which means a guarantee that servers won’t constantly be down) are important factors to consider.Your website isn’t going to load in good time if your bandwidth is limited or serves are down. So finding a reliable provider is crucial.
- Optimize Images
Everyone loves images. They’re also an important marketing tool because they drive audience engagement. But the downside is that too many graphics and images can slow down your website. Fortunately the solution is simple.Avoid the urge to use too many images on each page of your website and resize the images you plan to use.
- Reduce Plug-ins And Add-ons
Plug-ins and add-ons are common elements of any website. Most of them add value, but some of them just don’t. Having too many of these little extras on your website will slow it down. Take a look at the amount of plug-ins and add-ons you have installed, see which ones are the most necessary and delete the rest. It’s also a good idea to test your website to see if any of them are affecting your load time. A good quality plug-in should not be slowing down your site. If it is you need to look for a better alternative.
- Avoid Using Too Much Code
If your website has a lot of messy code it will take longer to load. This is because websites with a lot of CSS files and JavaScript lead to a larger amount of HTTP requests when people access different pages on your site. These are treated as individual requests by a user’s browser and increases load times. So removing unnecessary CSS files and JavaScript will speed things up.
- Limit Font Use
Using different fonts is a very easy way to make your website look cool. Unfortunately fonts add extra HTTP requests to external resources which negatively impact your speed. While it’s tempting to mix things up, try sticking to one or two standard fonts.
Comments