Nobody likes a slow website! Infact, most people searching for products or services online become frustrated with poor performing sites and quickly move on to the next available provider.
Statistics shows that users will easily abondon sites that take more than 4 seconds to load. These days, page speed and overall site performance plays an important role in the way online users interact with your website, engage with your business or make purchases. This means, it is now your responsibility to ensure that your online marketing strategy include goals for addressing site loading speed limitations and other technical SEO concerns.
Imagine the number of potential prospects that could be avoiding your business and going elsewhere because of a slow performing website. Some online marketers also believe that once a potential client leave your site there's no coming back, regardles if you are offering high quality products or services dirt cheap. For some online visitors, first impression last and any negative experience with your brand could be the make or break point that leave a lasting impact on their mind.
With that said, if slow site performance is affecting the credibility and growth of your business, how would you know and what steps can be taken to speed up page loading time and make your website operate faster?
In this article, we will reveal 5 key tips that can increase your website speed, and in doing so, could potentially lead to increased visitor engagement, higher online traffic conversion and boost your website rank position across search engines.
1. Choose a Fast Web Host
Choosing where your website reside is one of the important decisions you need to make when it comes to establishing an effetive online presence. Having the correct host to support your online presence will depend what website platform you intend to build on. Some owners host their sites on Content Management Systems (CMS) for blogs and eCommerce stores, while others are gradually moving away from static websites to benefit from better online user experiences and faster site speeds.
If your online strategy requires having multiple websites, then it maybe worthwhile to check if your web host can accommodate this under a single account, or would you need to open additional accounts. Reserach your options and understand what costs will be involved to suatain the growth of your online presence. Not having the correct host will impact your budget, technical skills and effort, therefore choosing a fast and affordable website host should be one of the first things to get right first time.
One of the main point to consider is how much traffic are you looking to have going to your website. Higher traffic will demands more resources from the web host servers and a shared-hosting plan might not scale well.
Some web hosts do not support SSL certificates by default and this can result in unexpected costs activities that may require site migration and therefore affect your website uptime.
2. Leverage Browser Caching for Faster Site Load Time
Browser caching enable websites to store files and entities locally on your your computer by means of caching, so that additional page fetches results in faster site response. Optimising expired headers can enable your browser and website to work in harmony for best user experiences.
3. Enable Gzip Compression to Boost Site Speed
Gzip is a website compression technique that enable websites to be made smaller and therefore faster data transfer rates between the web host and the end user.
It is also a file format. Enabling gzip compression for your website is now a standard website optimistion and site speed performance metrics.
4. Use a CDN for Faster Page Load Speed
Having a Content Delivery Network (CDN) allow users across wider geographic locations to get data from servers that are closer to their local reach. The concept of CDN can significantly boost your website performance, technical SEO metrics and has the following benefits:
- It promote faster page speed load times for desktop and mobile users.
- Website scalability is maintained during heavy visitor traffic periods.
There are significant savings on infrastructure costs by offloading heavy traffic demands to the CDN platform. Essentially, having a content delivery network reduce site latency, promote faster loading website and improve user experience.
5. Optimise your Images & Template Scripts
By optimisation your Javascript, cascading style sheet and images you will reduce website request and response times. This will make your site load faster and increase user experience.
In Concluding...
By increasing your webssite speed, it is easy to see how you can benefit from higher visitor traffic which in most cases will result in more pleasant online user experiences. Not having a reliable website can make visitors lose interest in your products ad services in favour of your competitors, but this can be prevented with the correct approach.
At Marcomz Networks, we help businesses and brands on older or non-secure websites migrate to newer compliant website platforms, as well as address technical and SEO challenges that boost exposure and client conversion. We would love to help you with bespoke SEO services that can help your business generate high converting traffic, increase conversions and boost sales. To get started with SEO services that can work for you, simply get in touch.