Amazon loses $1.6 billion sales in a year with a page-load delay of just one second. In a similar story, Google calculated a loss of 8M searches per day if it slows the search results by one-fourth of a second. You may be not as big as Google or Amazon, but implications are still the same. Watch out for 7 easy ways to improve your website speed and witness a conversion explosion!
You have stepped in the online world with a beautiful and catchy website but, you experience a high bounce rate and a handful of conversions. Why?
Did you check your Website loading speed? Yes, that’s the main culprit.
Speed is one of the prime ranking factors for Google Search and Ads as it directly impacts the user experience. This means that with a slow website you are not only losing your visitors but your potential clients as well. Not only desktop but the speed of the website matters on mobile devices too.
Why my website loads slowly?
There could be several reasons for a slow website such as from heavy images to too-much HTTP redirects or server issues etc. Keep reading to unveil the top 7 ways to speed up your WordPress website.
What is the best speed loading time?
According to SEMRush, getting a speed below 3 seconds makes you faster than 50% of the websites. If you are into eCommerce business, then Google emphasizes to load within two seconds. It also suggests that, if your website takes more than 10s to load, then you have a chance to lose 123% of conversions.
Surprised? Yes, here are a few tips, tricks and tools that will help you to improve your speed load time and hit back on rankings.
1. Google Page Insights
Google offers a free tool for page speed analysis called Google Page speed. Just enter your URL and it will analyze and share insights based on the score.
If your score is between 90 and 100, your website is doing great but if it’s between 0 and 49, then you must do something as you may be losing a great amount of traffic.
Apart from speed score, this amazing tool offers several insights to improve your speed. Go through them and improvise your page. Make sure to do it for both, desktop and mobile interface.
2. Minimize HTTP Requests
When a page loads, 80% of the time is spent in loading other elements of the page such as Javascripts, CSS, images etc. As all these elements are placed above the HTML <body> tag, HTTP requests are made to call them before the main body gets load. More on-page components mean more loading time.
Chrome (browser) users can easily inspect the number of HTTP requests made on a page by using the ‘INSPECT’ tool which is visible by right-clicking on the page. The ‘Network’ tab will show how many HTTP requests are being made to the server along with the loading time.
By reducing the HTTP requests, you can improve your page load speed to a great extent. This can be done by Minifying HTML.
3. Minifying HTML
The best way to reduce CSS, HTML, JS etc files is to combine them and minifying the HTML. It also means cleaning and validating the HTML code such as eliminating duplicate code, whitespaces, line-breaks, optimizing lines of code, unnecessary formatting etc.
Combining all CSS files or JS files into one would make the code less clumsy and more efficient. If you are a WordPress user, then there are many plug-ins available such as WP Super Minify, WP Rocket etc. No need to understand the technicalities of coding. These plug-ins make life damn easy.
If you are not a WordPress user, then you can connect with your developer or any professional web development agency for help.
4. Using Google’s AMP Framework
According to a survey, it was found that a 1s delay in mobile browsers could increase the bounce rate by 8%, the conversion rate is throttled by 3.5% and page views are lowered by 9%.
Back in 2016, the AMP framework was introduced by Google to speed up the mobile pages. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) allows the website content to be hosted on Google AMP Cache. The simplicity of the code allows the users to view the cached page instantly. The load time for AMP pages is just 1 second.
This drastically improves the user experience for mobile users. AMP gives you speed and thus, ranking.
5. Use CDN
Using a CDN, Content Delivery Network allows your website to be present on all across the globe. Suppose your website is hosted in India, and the request arrives from the US. CDN will replicate your website on the local US servers so that it can be loaded pretty much fast rather than getting routed from India.
A CDN caches your website on several global servers and when the request arrives, it is routed to the nearest server.
6. Browser Caching
By allowing caching on the visitor’s page, you can significantly improve all the page load speed metrics. As all the images, CSS etc would already be available on the device; the page loading turns faster the next time the user visits the page. Fewer HTTP requests would be made. There are many WordPress plug-ins such as WP Total Cache, WP Super Cache etc for browser caching.
If you are not a WordPress user then reach out to your web developer for caching related queries.
7. Image Optimization
Large HD images may be one of the reasons for the slow loading of your webpage. Compress the images or optimize them for the best response for mobile as well as desktop users. While compressing them, make sure to retain their quality. The smaller the images the less is the loading time.
So, these are a few yet effective techniques to speed up your website. Make sure that your WordPress, plug-ins etc versions are updated. Try using external hosting services for your videos, images etc that use a lot of space and embed them thereafter.
Is your website still lagging in rankings or visibility, connect with me for a consultation or audit. Stay tuned and connected for more interesting updates from the blogging world.