A major factor that can turn off a visitor to your website is the speed of your website. This impacts your SEO and conversion rates as well. By improving the performance of your website, you will be able to increase the traffic to the site.
If you are wondering how to speed up your website, there are many resources online that you can refer to. There are also companies that offer SEO services that can help with improving the speed. You need to make sure that your website is tested daily in order to find errors and keep up with the performance of the site. You can carry out a speed test to check which aspects as affecting the performance of the website. You can find many free tests online to measure the performance and speed of a website. These tests will give you an in-depth view of website performance. You can also use a content delivery network or a CDN. These can improve website speed by cashing content in many locations around the world. Whenever there is a request for content, the request will go to the CDN server instead of the hosting server. As CDN servers are closer to the end users than the host server, loading time for the website pages can be greatly reduced.
You need to optimise your content in order to reduce load times. One such content that you need to focus on is images as they are very large file sizes. What you can do to optimise the images are reduce the resolution of the image, reduce the size of the image and compress the image files. There are also applications that you can find online that provide image optimisation and compressing services. There may be unnecessary aspects of codes such as code comments, whitespace etc. You need to remove these in order to reduce the size of the files. But this has to be done in conjunction with other optimisation strategies for a noticeable effect.
Browsers tend to save copies of static files in a browser cache. This is a temporary storage location. This allows the browsers to quickly load a webpage that a user has visited recently. So when you are developing the website, you can instruct the browser to cache aspects of the webpage that are not subjected to frequent change. Doing this can reduce the amount of data required by the server to send the browser. This in turn can reduce load times. You should also reduce using external scripts as this can slow down a webpage. Websites use redirects and this can increase load times when used unnecessarily. You need to make sure there is proper infrastructure in place to allow for high speeds. So you need to have a high-performance server. If your website has a lot of traffic, it is best to choose a dedicated server. Shared servers can slow down the website. Check that you are using the latest versions of technology so that there are fewer bugs to deal with.
