No one likes a slow website. Users will simply lose patience and shop elsewhere. So, here are a few quick tips on how to easily improve your website speed and page load times:
1. Reduce media size (images, video, etc.)
There are lots of tools available online to help compress video sizes or, better yet, host videos externally. Videos can be hosted on sites such as YouTube or Vimeo, then embedded into your website; this way it is not your website’s bandwidth that is being used. Hosting videos on other platforms also allows you to gain more exposure compared to just adding a video to your site.
2. Compress/reduce the number of scripts (CSS, javascript, etc).
Compressing scripts allows your website to read smaller script files instead of large ones. If you perform this process on multiple scripts, your website is less likely to make requests to script files. This means the website has fewer files to load, and this speeds up the page loading time and improves your overall website speed.
3. Enable caching (either using a plugin or managed on the server side)
We recommend that you ask an experienced developer to help you with this task. Enabling caching means your returning visitors don’t need to wait for their web browser to download all the files needed to load the website again. This is because caching stores a local copy of the website files in the visitor’s browser.
4. Deactivate/uninstall plugins or extensions which are not required
Keeping the backend of your website tidy encourages quicker website loading times as there is less for the website to load. So, do a little spring clean of your system every once in a while.
5. Check your hosting package
As they say, you get what you pay for. If you’re on low-cost cloud hosting, or any kind of shared server, you may be sharing bandwidth with a host of other websites which could be slowing things down for you.
If you can’t afford a dedicated server, maybe try a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). Even though the server would be shared, you would be hosted within your own virtual space. Make sure you check the bandwidth, storage capacity, and regularity of updates.
At Studio Illicit, we now host all new sites on a VPS, and all of the carbon relating to web hosting is offset! You can take a look at what we offer here.
To finish – speed is everything when it comes to keeping a user engaged and getting them to browse your site. These are all things that are easy to carry out and are inexpensive to implement. For more information on how to improve website speed, don’t hesitate to contact us – info@studioillicit.com.
Oh, and here are a few tools to check webpage speed (note: this is the speed of one webpage only, not all pages on the site):
- Google PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- GTmetrix
https://gtmetrix.com/
- Pingdom
https://tools.pingdom.com/