Website speed is critical to not just customer satisfaction, conversion rates, but also search engines. Google places much importance on loading speeds of pages. If you don’t believe speed makes a difference, think again. A single 1-second delay when loading website pages, can cause over 10% fewer page views, 15% decrease in customer satisfaction, and over 6% loss in conversion rates.
Learn with these 5 methods to speed up websites and get better results. Large companies have known the importance of speed for some time. For example, Amazon reported an increase of revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed.
It is not just about search engines. Customers have expectations as well these days. Over 45% of people expect a website page to load in two or less seconds. Over 40% of people leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. There are many reasons to have a fast loading website, but many do not fully understand how to go about it. Here are methods to speed up websites.
5 Methods To Speed Up Websites
1. Optimize images for speed.
Images are often overlooked by companies. With images, size and format are important to consider. Crop images to fit better and save them to reduce size throughout the website, especially on the home page.
2. Reduce amount of plugins used.
Plugins slow a website down. The more plugins a website uses, the slower it will load. Deactivate or delete any unnecessary plugins for the website. Not all plugins are the same as well. Review the used applications and prioritize.
3. Minimize HTTP requests.
To minimize HTTP requests, streamline the number of elements on the website pages. Use CSS instead of images, combine style sheets, and reduce scripts or place them at the bottom of the website page.
4. Enable compression for large pages.
Compression reduces the bandwidth of website pages. Therefore compression reduces HTTP responses. There are many tools out there for it such as Gzip.
5. Cleanup the website page code.
This is for the more experienced. The code of each website page can be significantly minimized (cleaned). Often less experienced developers or WYSIWYG tools create messy code, slowing down the pages.
To get the best results for websites, hire professionals and experts. It is the fastest way to get the right results. Proper website optimization especially for speed is critical to gaining online results.
