Google recently implemented a new criterion to determine the ranking of search results – the actual loading speed of the website.
Decreasing your website’s loading speed is not only important for getting a high search ranking, it also affects your visitors’ perception about your website and your business. 2 out of 5 visitors to your website visitors will leave immediately if any webpage taking longer than 3 seconds to load – 1/2 of internet users expect a webpage to load in less than 2 seconds.
Ideally, no page should take longer than 3 seconds to load When you are developing your website, there are many ways you can speed up your page load time.
Today, there are millions of websites on the Internet. To get people to notice your website from the crowd, ranking high on search result listings is very important. 4 out of 5 people use Google to search for information, products and services every day. If you can get your website visible to your target audience, it will definitely boost your bottom line.
How to Improve Your Websites Load Speed
Google considers the loading speed of the website as one of the ranking factors in prioritizing sites in the user’s search results. So one should make sure that site loads faster. There are many ways which can be used to enhance the loading speed of your website and provide a better experience to the visitor.
Remove Unused WordPress Plugins
If your website is built on WordPress, there’s a good chance you have a plugin or two activated, which you don’t actually use. The use of a large number of WordPress plugins on your website can decrease its loading speed considerably. The more plugins that need time to load, the slower a webpage will load. If you’re not using a WordPress plugin, deactivate and delete it to get back some of that lost speed.
This may be an ironic comment, but checkout the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) WordPress plugin to identify the plugins which take the longest to load and consider replacing them with a plugin that has similar, but faster loading, features.
Reducing the Use of External Files
The use of external files such as JavaScript and style sheets should be reduced as much as possible. The use of these increases the load time of the web page.
It is common for a WordPress website, theme or plugin to load fonts from an external source, such as Google Fonts, frame work files, such as Twitter’s Bootstrap or other JavaScript files from 2rd party services, such as live chat, analytics, social media integrations, etc. Use your browser to view the page source and make a decision which of these external files are actually needed.
Optimize Images and Photos
It is worth considering optimizing your image files. As we all know, images are an indispensable for any website. However, there are numerous images formats with different files sizes available. Generally speaking, PNGs can provide graphics with transparent backgrounds, but have a larger file size than jpeg. Bitmaps image file also take up a large amount of memory. To ensure a speedy webpage loading time, you’re better off avoiding using BMP files all-together. In addition, animated gifs and flash files will increase page load time and should be used carefully.
You can optimize your images before uploading to your website, or knock it all out at one time as you upload the images – this is what we do here on the Search Centered website – An indispensable plugin for image optimization is the Imsanity plugin for WordPress. With Imsanity, you can set a maximum image size and compression quality. Imsanity will do the rest. Simply upload your image and Imsanity will automatically resize it and compress it for you!
Simple Website Design
Most fast loading websites have a very simple and consumer friendly website design. Too much complication and actions in a website’s design will slow down the loading speed, undoubtedly. Web developers who are not able to find a balance between functional detail and visual presentation, are likely to deliver a website where the design is overkill and adversely affects usability and speed.
This, of course, is not always the case, many web designers are able to find the right balance and create functional and elegant websites with simple layouts.
Get a Better Web Host
If you tried everything discussed above, chances are you need a better and faster web hosting company. Simply put, not all web hosts and web servers are the same. If you’ve purchased a cheap or bare-bones hosting plan, chances are, you’re web host speeds are not very good.
Get Professional Help Speeding up Your Website
Contact Search Centered if you need help speeding up your website or if you need a better and faster web host!
