Obviously having a slow-loading website will prevent people from staying on your site. If it takes longer than 4 seconds to load a page, many people will leave. Not only will speeding up your site help with retaining visitors, but it will also be good for SEO. One of the factors in the Google algorithm is speed. Therefore, if your site loads slowly, it may not rank it higher in search results.
There are a lot of tips on how to speed up your site online and here are the top 5 strategies to help you immediately speed things up:
5 things to make your website load faster.
1. Make the images smaller.
Obviously, images and pictures are an excellent form of content because they can make the site more interesting and draw people in. However, if they are slowing down your site, they are doing more harm than good. First, inspect the pictures on the site and determine if they are really a necessity. If it does not seem like it is contributing to the site at all, then get rid of it.
Once you have determined which pictures to keep, make them smaller. You can do this by reducing the physical size of the image. This will help the page load faster. If you must make the picture smaller than you would like then just make a link with it to the full-size image. In addition, you should make the file size smaller, and this can be achieved with a good image optimizer. There are a lot of them for free online, and this can reduce the size considerably (like imagecompressor.com).
2. Get rid of long pages.
The shorter the page, the faster the site will load. Not only that, but it will help visitors stay longer because people often get overwhelmed by longer content.
The shorter the page, the more manageable it looks. You can break long content into parts or pages so that you can engage users more without disturbing them.
3. Use a quality hosting company.
The tinier hosting companies are fine for sites without a lot of traffic. However, once you start getting more visitors, they will be insufficient. This is because more visitors require more bandwidth, something smaller companies do not have lots of. If you either are getting a lot of visitors, or are planning on it in the future, you might want to pay a bit more to go with a quality company.
Of course, it will be a bit more expensive, but the added costs are worth it.
4. Get rid of advertisements.
Advertisements are generally are loaded from external sites, and therefore will slow down your site. If you are not seeing much progress from a particular advertisement, getting rid of it would be a good idea.
Or use only reliable and trusted ad associates like AdSense, Media.Net, BuySellAds, etc.
5. Offload heavy contents to other 3rd party or CDN services.
Ideally, you want to get rid of huge files on your site completely. Certain files like animated images or videos require a lot of bandwidth and therefore use alternatives if you can and embed them on your website, this way you can gain speed without making any big expenditure.
If you still want to load files from your domain (because of branding issue) use CDN (content delivery network) to offload all those heavy static files to a subdomain hosted by CDN.
Want to know more about CDNs? Read here.
Conclusion.
Having a quicker loading site is important for SEO and your bottom line. Otherwise, your visitors will leave before they even get to view your content, and all your efforts will have been wasted.
Use these 5 tips, and you will speed up your site quickly and easily.
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