How long does your website take to load? We live in an era where attention spans are going extinct, and if your site load time is a little slow, you’re probably costing yourself a lot of business. Today, users looking to purchase products or book services online do so with 10+ browser tabs open at once. If your site is sluggish, your tab gets closed; there are simply too many options out there for somebody to justify wasting their time navigating a laggy website.
According to Amazon, every 100ms of load delay costs 1% of sales. That’s a huge blow to any business’s bottom line, and it’s why our SEO company’s site performance test and optimization service is so popular.
With this in mind, our SEO company’s web design team put together a list of ways to increase your site’s page load speed.
- Compress your images. Nothing bogs down a web page load time quite like overly rich images. High-resolution images may seem worthwhile if you’re really trying to wow your audience, but they’re of no use if your audience bounces off the page before it even has a chance to load! Compress all of your images. There are a number of free tools for image compression, many of which do not reduce image quality. Our SEO company can point you in the right direction.
- Minify your CSS and JavaScript. “Minifying” reduces file size by deleting excess characters, comments, and white space from your CSS and JavaScript files. Developers can leave unnecessary spaces as they work through code, and these can increase the size of your main CSS file. Removing these excesses will save a lot of load time. If you’re using a WordPress template, consider the Autoptimize plugin.
- Leverage your browser caching. To do this, you want a CDN, or “content delivery network,” to manage most of your caching. This gives your website an easy load time anywhere in the world, whereas keeping statical files on your website forces users in India to wait longer for your Canadian or US servers to load. A CDN puts your site’s cache nearer to users around the world, reducing load time substantially.
- Obliterate render-blocking resources. According to our SEO company’s tech team, thsi is one of the most difficult aspects of site speed optimization. It requires a lot of technical knowledge. If you’re using Autoptimize, you should have your bases covered; otherwise, give our team a call at (416)-619-7935.
- Optimize the mobile version of your site. You can see how your site looks on mobile platforms easily using a Google Chrome browser. Simply select the menu button where you’d open a new tab on the top right of the screen, then select “More Tools > Developer Tools.” On the left side of the screen, you’ll be able to see how your site performs on mobile devices. If you see any problems, contact our web design team at (416)-619-7935.
We hope these 5 site speed optimization tips will be of use to you! Check back here for more next month, or give our team a call at (416)-619-7935 for help putting this advice to work.