A slow website can damage your business’ bottom line. First, it frustrates your visitors, thus giving them a reason for abandoning whatever they wanted to do in favor of your competition. That right there signifies a loss of revenue. Two, the frustrated visitors could spread this news to their friends or share their terrible experiences on social media, thus denying you more traffic; 51% of US customers mentioned website speed as a top reason to abandon an online purchase.. For these reasons, among others, you should prioritize speeding up the website. Fortunately, there are a few measures you can implement to increase speed and make this a reality.
Minimizing the time the page takes before it starts loading
It would also be great for you to reduce the time each web page takes before it starts loading. Technically, this is known as the time to first byte or TTFB. Do not limit yourself only to how much time the page requires before loading fully. According to Google, the world’s most dominant search engine, TTFB should not be longer than 200ms. How do you resolve this issue? Implement this measure right from the server side, which has nothing to do with the front-end. While at it, check if the Internet connection is also stable enough.
Compressing Images
The size of images on your website is one reason that affects the speed at which it loads. For this reason, you should compress images on all your web pages to make them load faster. In this regard, you could start by resizing the images on Photoshop, which is quite easy to do. For best results, you should restrict yourself to images that are smaller than 500KB. Anything larger than this could seriously affect the optimal speed of your website, which should take roughly 3 seconds to open.
Reducing server response time
While still on the issue of server, it is also good to focus on reducing its response time. Otherwise, everything else you do would have no impact whatsoever on the speed. Here, the factor that should capture your imagination is the time that DNS takes to look up and respond to any request. Therefore, give special attention to your choice of DNS provider. If the provider seems a bit slow, your site will suffer. In such situations, it’s prudent to look for a better and faster DNS provider. If you ignore this, browsers would have a torrid time finding your site.
Selecting the best hosting for your site
The choice of hosting also has an impact on the speed at which your web pages load. For most new website owners, money (or lack thereof) determines their choice of hosting. Ideally, you should never base such a decision on price alone. If you focus on money only, you will notice the mistake you just made the moment your website starts receiving more traffic. Nevertheless, you should consider various hosting options depending on several factors. For the most part, your options would include:
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated server
Dedicated hosting is the best as it offers you more freedom and space.
Therefore, apply these measures to increase the speed of your site for the visitors’ benefit.