Are you tired of slow websites? Your visitors are, too.
Research shows that most people expect a website to load in less than three seconds. Any longer and you’re bound to lose visitors.
If you’re not quite making the cut, there’s no reason to worry. With a few simple updates, you can speed up your website and increase your conversions. Keep reading to learn five helpful tips on how to make web pages load faster.
1. Cache Is Cash
Caching is the process of storing select information on a user’s computer to expedite load times on repeat visits. Sounds great, right?
It gets better! Enabling a cache layer is often as easy as installing a plugin.
This tip alone can shave valuable seconds off of your site’s loading time.
2. Redirect Only When Necessary
Nothing is more frustrating to a user than constant redirects. Not only are you dealing with one page’s load times, but then you’re turning around and having to load an entirely different page.
While redirects are unavoidable for the most part, there are several ways to minimize excessive HTTP requests.
For starters, run a waterfall analysis to identify your site’s weak points. The test will run through your entire website and identify page loading times.
You’ll also need to check that your plugins and links aren’t interfering.
3. Optimize Images
Everyone loves beautiful, high-res images. Everyone, that is, except your analytics expert.
As a general rule, the larger the file, the longer the loading time. So whenever you can, make sure you’re optimizing your images for load time and not just quality.
While the JPEG format compresses images by quite a bit, you won’t lose much visual fidelity.
Here’s another fun trick for website speed and SEO: tag your images using keywords. Not only will this cut down on load times, but you’ll get a nice little boost in the search rankings the next time a crawler comes across your site.
4. Keep Plugins Up to Date
Plugins like Yoast and Jetpack are fantastic for learning more about your visitors. However, older versions of plugins don’t always interact well with your website.
Updated plugins may feature refined code. The less code your website has to parse through in order to load, the faster visitors can browse your site.
5. Change Hosts
Ultimately, the issue may not be your website at all. It might be something as simple as partnering with a host whose servers don’t offer enough space to store all of your site’s resources.
While dedicated server hosting might cost a bit more upfront, the extra capacity tends to be worth the investment.
The Need for Speed: How to Make Web Pages Load Faster
The importance of page speed is only going to increase in the coming years. So take these tips on how to make web pages load faster and use them to improve your website.
We’ll see you on the front page!
Speaking of which, make sure to check back with our blog for more tips on improving your website.