5 Ways to Easily Decrease Your Website’s Page Loading Times

5 Ways to Easily Decrease Your Website’s Page Loading Times

If you think about it, chances are you can remember a time you navigated off a website because the page was taking too long to load. A slow website can reduce the amount of time a potential customer spends on your site, and can even lead to a lost conversion. Additionally, since 2010, Google has been account for a site’s speed in organic search ranking algorithms.

You may be wondering how to check your website speed – an important first step in evaluating and strategizing. Luckily there are some great resources out there, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Just be sure to take a deep breath before looking at the results (seriously, just take it a chunk at a time before going into panic mode.

Read on for five ways you can speed up your website, and race past your competition!

1. Optimize Images

Large, improperly scaled images one-way tickets to sluggish page speeds. The best way to ensure this is not the case is to get the images to scale before uploading them to your CMS. Alternatively, you could compress them using free tools such as www.tinypng.com, redicing your image sizes without losing integrity and quality.

Just do not make the mistake of using large images and trying to then scale them down with CSS – your browser will still load them at full image size.

2. Enable Browser Caching

While we are on the topic of browsers, enabling browser caching will allow some of your data to be saved locally to a user’s computer. This eliminates wait times presented by waiting for it to load every single visit. This can be accomplished through contacting your hosting company or using some resources such as Apache Caching.

3. Enable Compression

Think of compression as the consolidation of your website – much like you would with files into a zip file. With compression you can see up to a 70% decrease in page size. Think of all the time and data saved with that much less clutter. To do this, you need to work with your server settings using a compression resource or through your hosting provider.

4. Optimize CSS

Before a website visitor even starts to see your website, there is CSS loading in the background. If there is a delay on this loading, the time it takes to populate your website on the front-end increases. Begin with eliminating CSS “fluff” and minimizing CSS files by taking out extra spacing in stylesheets. Every space counts – make them work for you rather than against you!

5. Keep Scripts Below the Fold

Javascript doesn’t need to load before your content, and it shouldn’t if you want your site to load faster. Place Javascript files at the bottom of the page, just before the closing body tag. Additionally, you can use defer or async attributes. Just know the difference before embarking on this aspect of your journey to faster website load times.

And remember…test, test, test!

If you follow the tips above, you’ll provide your website visitors with a much better online experience, thus keeping them around long enough to convert to paying customers!