Slow Website? How to Boost Your Site Speed and Increase Your Customer Traffic!
Having a slow website can be very damaging for your business. Visitors won’t stick around and they might not want to come back again. In fact, research shows that users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load! We all know how crucial first impressions are when it comes to online businesses, and a slow website is one of the easiest ways to put off potential customers.
Moreover, Google has confirmed that loading speed will be an important factor in search engine rankings in future. That means if you have a slow website and you want more visitors from search engines, then you need to take action now.
This article will cover everything you need to know about having a slow website and tips on how to make your site faster so that visitors flock and return again.
What makes a site slow?
This is the first question that comes to mind when we talk about slow websites. When it comes to speed, everything matters – your hosting provider, your content management system (CMS), your website’s design and most importantly, your website’s load time. Let’s go through each of these to understand what makes a site slow.
- Hosting provider - Your hosting provider is the very first thing that comes into the picture when we talk about website speed. If you are using a hosting service that is not optimized for speed, then there is a big chance that your site may be slow. Hosting services are optimized for speed in two ways: They have servers that are strategically placed so that your site loads quickly for your visitors who are based in different areas around the world, and they use fully managed hosting services that automatically update your website.
- CMS - Your CMS might also be responsible for a slow website. If you are using a fully featured CMS for your website that was not built keeping speed in mind, then you might face issues. Most websites use WordPress as their CMS. While WordPress is one of the fastest content management systems available, there are several plugins and themes available in the marketplace that might slow your website down.
- Website design - You need to remember that no matter how fast your hosting and CMS might be, if your website design is not optimized, it will be slow. There are several things that you need to consider when designing your website. The size of images, the amount of content, the number of pages on your website and many more. If you design your website with speed in mind, then you won’t face issues.
- Website load time - Website load time is the amount of time that your website takes to completely load in the browser. It is calculated by adding up the time it takes for your server to fully receive a request from the browser and start delivering content, and the time it takes for the browser to receive and process all the information and display it on the user’s screen.
- The hosting platform that you use with your website can also have an impact on your website’s load speed. If you’re using a cheap hosting company, then there is a chance that your site is loading slower than it would if it was hosted on a more reputable platform.
Tips to make your website faster
There are a few basic tips that you can use to make your website faster. If possible, use a content delivery network (CDN) for images and videos. A CDN will store the images and videos on servers around the world, which will help to reduce load times and improve site performance. Another important tip is to optimize your website’s images. If you’re including images in your content, then make sure that they are of a decent quality. If you are using images with large file sizes on your website, there is a chance that your website will be slower than it would if you reduced the file size.
When it comes to the code, you need to make sure that you’re using as few plugins as possible. Having too many plugins on your website can slow down your site, so try to keep the plugins to the absolute minimum. Finally, make sure that your website’s hosting platform is up to scratch. If you’re using a cheap hosting platform, then there is a chance that your site will be slower than it would be if you were using a more reputable hosting platform.
Video hosting platforms
No matter how much you optimize your website, if you are hosting your videos on your website, your website will be slow. There are many video hosting platforms available in the market that make it easy to host videos and distribute them on your website. Hosting your videos outside your website will help increase your website speed.
Some of the best video hosting platforms include:
- Wistia - Wistia is a video hosting platform for businesses and is used by many large businesses. It is a great choice if you want to go with a reliable hosting service that offers a ton of features and has been around for a while.
- YouTube - YouTube is another video hosting platform that is used by businesses to host videos on their website. However, YouTube is not designed for businesses and is a good choice only if you have a small website.
- Vimeo - Vimeo is a video hosting platform made specifically for businesses and is one of the fastest video hosting platforms available in the market today. It is also a great option if you want more control over who can view your videos and managing video permissions.
Browser caching
One of the easiest ways to make your website faster is to implement browser caching. With browser caching, you’ll be able to load your website much faster on each visit, as the information will be pulled from the cache rather than being loaded from the server.
When it comes to browser caching, there are two main options. You can use a content delivery network (CDN) or a distributed caching system such as Cloudflare. Both of these options will cache your website and make it load much faster.
If you have a WordPress website, you can use a plugin to enable browser caching. However, if you’re running a different type of website, then you can still enable browser caching. You just need to contact your hosting provider and ask them to enable it. This is a very easy thing to do and it can make a big difference to the speed of your website.
CDN services
If you want to make your website even faster, then you might want to look into using a CDN service. A content delivery network is a network of servers that are geographically dispersed. This means that your website files will be distributed across multiple servers. This can help to make your website much faster. If you’re interested in using a CDN for your website, there are a few different options. You can use a service called Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, or Google Cloud CDN.
Using a CDN is not a cheap option, but it can make your website a lot faster. If you’re interested in using a CDN, then you’ll need to make sure that your hosting provider supports it.
Web development best practices
One of the best ways to make your website faster is to optimize your images. You need to make sure that your images are not too large, and that they are not using the wrong type of file. You can also make your website faster by optimizing your website’s code. You can do this by finding out which parts of your website take the longest to load and then optimizing them. You can also improve your loading time by optimizing your database. Make sure that you’re not including unnecessary information in your database. If you’re using WordPress, then you can use a plugin like WP-Cleanup to optimize your database.
Summary
Having a slow website is one of the easiest ways to put off potential customers. It can also be damaging to your business in the long run.
Fortunately, there are a few different ways that you can speed up your website. If possible, use a CDN service. Host your videos on a separate platform from your website, such as YouTube or Vimeo, use browser caching, and optimize your images. Make sure that you’re also optimizing your code and database to make your site as fast as possible.
Having a slow website is damaging for your business, but it’s something that you can easily avoid.