What can you do if your website loads slowly?
If you don't do anything, you're going to lose customers, plain and simple. People surfing the web have incredibly high expectations.
They want everything to happen instantly. So visitors will leave if your site takes more than three seconds to load. The probability that they'll leave your site increases by 90% after three seconds.
Amazon found that a mere 100-millisecond delay in load times cost them millions.
Speed matters to your bottom line. Want to know what you can do to speed up your websites' load times? Read on to find out.
1. How Slow Is Your Website?
You have a hunch your website loads slowly, but you're not sure if your site is slow or not. You can run a few tests to find out the speed of your site. Online tools like Google Page Speed Insights, GT Metrix, and Pingdom will test your site for free.
Google's speed test will give you mobile and desktop speed data.
You'll know the speed of your site, and those online tools will give you suggestions to fix any speed issues.
2. Check Plugins
WordPress powers more than 30% of the top 10 million sites on the web. So there is an excellent chance WordPress powers your website.
WordPress plugins are amazing, and there is a plugin for everything you may need to customize your site. The issue with plugins is that they can also slow down your website.
Plugins can bloat your site if you use too many. Plugins that you have installed but no longer use also take up resources when the page is loading.
If you don't need a plugin, deactivate it or delete it. You want to try and keep the number of plugins you use to 20 or less.
3. Compress Images
One of the easiest ways to speed up your website is to compress all the image files. Unfortunately, images tend to take up more bandwidth than other files, which will easily affect the speed of your site.
You want to compress images without losing quality. You can use online tools or programs like Photoshop and PhotScape X to compress images before uploading them.
Of course, WordPress also has image compression plugins you can use. Our recommendation is to deactivate compression plugins after use and only activate them to compress new images when needed.
4. Cache and Compress Your Site
GZIP compression compresses your website's files, creates zip files of the files, then sends them to the site visitor's browser. That will lessen the bulk of your website, making it faster to download.
When someone goes to your site now, they download the entire site each time they visit. When you implement site caching, you're storing a copy of your site. As a result, users will only download new information or changes to your site, which makes it load faster.
5. Check Your Site's Code
No matter how pretty your site looks, it could be a complete mess behind the scenes. Templates could be designed for looks only and not for speed.
The code could be cumbersome and clunky, which can slow down your site.
You'll need to look for two things in your site's code.
The first is whether or not the CSS code is at the top. CSS needs to be fast and rendered before any other type of code.
Also, look at your tags. You don't want to have any JavaScript in the header tags. That will give your visitors a second or two of a blank white screen while the rest of the page loads. That's enough time to lose your visitors.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) maintains a cached version of your website on its servers, which will have copies of your website all over the world. As a result, a CDN will lower the bandwidth required to download your site's content.
A content delivery network can increase the speed of your website no matter where your site's visitors are.
7. Check Your Hosting Company
You don't want to blame your hosting company if your website loads slowly automatically. But, sometimes, they can be at fault if you sign up for a shared hosting plan.
With a shared hosting plan, you share space on a server with many other sites. If one site gets a lot of traffic, that site will consume a lot of the server's resources. This extra bandwidth will slow your website load times.
When you run speed tests, look at the server response time. That's an indication of your hosting company's performance.
Another potential issue with your hosting company could be its location. For example, if your customers are based primarily in North Carolina, but your servers are in California, that could slow your site down, too.
The information would need to travel from your customer's browser on the East Coast, go across the country, and travel back to North Carolina. News travels quickly, but as we've seen, even the slightest delay could cost money.
8. Limit the Number of Redirects
Sometimes, you can't help redirecting pages. For example, if you secured your website and changed your site from HTTP to HTTPS, you're going to have to set up a redirect, so all traffic goes to the secure HTTPS version.
Sometimes, You can set up redirects incorrectly. For example, these redirects could send a visitor from http://yourdomain.com to https://www.yourdomain.com to https://yourdoimain.com.
That will easily add a couple of seconds to your site's load time. Check the htaccess file to see how the site is coded to redirect URLs if you suspect this is an issue.
Website Loads Slowly? Fix-It Now
If your website loads slowly, it can be a silent business killer. You could be working hard to get traffic, only to see it go away because visitors don't stick around for the website to load completely.
If your website loads slowly, there are things that you can do. You can run speed tests, compress your images, and take measures to improve the backend code of your website.
Fortunately, you don't have to compromise a beautifully designed website for speed. Instead, we specialize in developing aesthetically pleasing websites that are fast.
Contact us today to see how we can help your business with North Carolina web design.
