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No one can waste a second online. Speed is vital. It is especially true for the loading time. If you find your site to be sluggish, that means it will make your users wait for more. The majority of online visitors don’t love to wait. They would bounce off to some other website. It automatically will give rise to minimized conversion rates, increasing bounce rates and low-quality search rankings.
The actual Page Loading Speed of a website has become even more important in 2018, following the recent modification of the Google algorithm that assigns a higher rank to the web sites that can guarantee faster page loading times on both desktop and mobile devices.
Importance of having a quick website speed
There have been several changes since the advent of the internet. Users' today expect a fast loading time. Your website should be able to cater to this expectation. Having a good website speed gets counted amongst the four Web Fundamentals for Google. The most significant drawback of a slow website is that people soon lose interest. At a day and age, when every online business owner and other brands want to make a mark, a site with a slow loading speed will act against your favor. The online market today is competitive. Hence, it’s imperative that business owners and entrepreneurs should do their best to maintain fast website loading speed.
Wondering what tactics you can deploy to boost up the website? Discussed below are useful guidelines that you can follow:
Minimize the HTTP requests
It is one of the commonly recommended processes that help to optimize website speed. Your web browser can source all the information from a server by making use of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Hence, if your web page is generating excess Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests, it will naturally become very slow. Several tactics are there which will help you curb down the count of the HTTP requests.
The most effective ones include the following:
- Try to use the CSS Sprites
- Try to opt-in for reduced code
- Minimize the number of 3rd party plug-ins that is important for external requests
- Do not resort to 3rd party frameworks until it is required
- Inline all your JavaScript
A professional SEO solution provider will be able to guide you better on this topic. If you want to resort to expert assistance, you can reach out to names like TitaniumclicksMedia and many others. You will get the best professional guidance.
Optimize your Images
In the majority of situations, the increased image size is the main reason for website speed being less. Based on recent studies and reports, about 64% of the website content is composed of images. Hence, image optimization needs to be one of the primary objectives for the website owners that will enhance the overall website performance. Several tools are available today; using which you can optimize your website images. The famous ones are listed below:
- ImageRecycle
- JPEG Optimizer
- Octify
- Optimizilla
Just in case you are using WordPress as your CMS, you might want to use the Octify plug-in. It is an effective option that converts all images automatically. It assists every kind of image format, for instance, GIF, PNG, JPG and many others. Even if you sign up for a free scheme, you will get to witness the no size limit feature. It indicates that you will be able to upload as much as 16GB single pictures completely for free. Hence, if you want to enhance the SEO ranks and sales, it’s best to optimize the pictures using this plug-in.
Optimize your Database
When you are running an eCommerce store or a site, chances are you are utilizing a database to store all the data on your website. Most people are unaware that their database can affect the web page speed. It happens when the same isn’t optimized well.
For optimizing it, you can add an index to the database for the page speed. By doing this, your database would find all the data sooner as it doesn’t require scanning many records.
Avert latency by opting in for a CDN
Wondering what a CDN is? It is a cluster of web servers distributed across various locations. CDN is known as a Content Delivery Network that assists in transferring the content fast from users depending on the area.
It helps to minimize the distance between the website server and users. It gets done by keeping the cached content across many regional locations, called the "points of presence." And every "point of presence" has several caching servers responsible for giving web content to the audience in its vicinity. Do you want to know the servers accountable for content delivery? If yes, then that gets evaluated by network presence counts. Usually, a server with less network hops when making use of a CDN. Furthermore, the CDN enables you to increase the delivery speed of your content worldwide. It is instrumental in bringing down the latency to a vast extent.
Minimize TTFB
TTFB is an acronym that stands for Time-To-First-Byte. It refers to the evaluation of the webs server responsiveness. It gets estimated as the HTTP request time, the HTTP response time and the process request time combined. Simply put, it indicates the time that a server waits before it receives its initial byte of information from the server. Want to add speed to your website? If yes, then it needs to be lower than 200ms based on the Google findings. You can also make use of Chrome Developer Tools to evaluate the time to review the first byte. When you invest in a quality CDN and DNS provider, you will have a stable solution for minimizing the complete TTFB.
Reducing 404 errors
Eliminating 404 errors is also useful. Any missing file generates a 404 error. It is surprising to know that between 60 and 100 MB of memory gets consumed by a server when there's a 404 error. Therefore, when your 404 errors are high on your website, it will have an adverse impact on the site. It will also ruin the chances for conversions. You can opt-in for an Online Broken Link Checker tool to find the broken links that are present in your site.
Conclusion
Increasing website speed is crucial to your online visibility and success. Hence, it is essential to find out if your website is performing at an optimum rate. And if you are thinking about how to maximize the website speed, then you can opt-in for the above-discussed methods and see a visible difference.
