10 Ways to Improve Your Website Speed

We all know that website speed matters a lot. It is a crucial factor of Technical SEO. Technical SEO refers to correcting the technical aspects of your website. Website loading speed is one of them.

Search engines focuses more on relevancy but if the content of two web pages are similar, Search engine will give priority to the website which will load faster.

User experience is as important as relevancy for search engines. Forget search engines, even if you are promoting your website through paid ads on social media and user are not able to see your page.

Its worst when you are spending a lot of your time on on your content and promoting it but the page is not loading quickly and user are finally abandoning it.

Here is the way out to improve the speed of your website.

10 ways to improve your website speed-

We will list out 10 crucial steps that will surely improve your page load speed.

1. Defer JavaScript Loading

Java script take a lot of time to load and many a times it blocks the page to load.

You can defer the Java Script loading by using plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache. Once you choose to defer the loading speed of Java, the First Content Paint time will improve and overall page will load faster.

2. Choose Fast Web Hosting

As a new blogger or new site owner, you might not have invested on a good web host. Often we start with cheapest possible option.

But slow web hosting will reduce the speed as the resources like Ram and CPU allocation is too low. You can check some of the best web hosting options at cheapandbesthosting.com and find the right fit for you.

You can also look at upgrading your options like from shared hosting to VPS or VPS to dedicated server.

3. Use CDN

Lets discuss what is CDN first. CDN stands for content distribution network. It reduces the load on your web server by creating multiple copies of your website on multiple servers.

For example if you have a visitor of USA, he will be served the content from the server nearest to USA and same process will be followed for all the users of all the countries.

Nearest server will reduce the look up time and faster page loads. As per cheapandbesthosting.com, Stack path is the cheapest and recommended CDN. If you don’t have budget, you can opt for Cloudflare CDN. Its free with few basic options.

4. Compress Images and Files

You would know that higher file size will have higher load time. For this, you can easily compress the files and images in the page.

Enable Gzip compression to reduce overall page size through plugins like W3 Total Cache. For Images, you can use image optimization plugins like Smush it.

5. Enable Browser Caching

Browser caching will instruct the browsers to store static files so that when the next time a particular page is opened, browser will not have to download it from the server. It will quickly serve them from the cached copies it already has.  This will drastically improve the page load time for repeat visitors.

Enable it through CDN or through plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket or any other cache plugins. Free cloudflare plan will also offer this function.

6.  Image Lazy Loading

In case your page has images, it will take time in loading. What if you have 5-10 or even more images? While most of the population still on 3G, they will have to wait for 15-20 seconds to see your page.

With lazy loading, as the name suggests, the page is loaded without images first. Then as per the frame on screen, the image keeps on loading one by one. Means the image on the top of page will load first, so on and so forth.

This will reduce the bounce rate and excellent user experience.

Jetpack and almost every cache plugin will give this feature for free.

7. Remove number of plugins

While plugin helps you to easily customize the pages and improve overall functionality, it also slows down the performance.

Higher the number of plugins in your website, slower will be the overall page delivery.

You should consider using only the limited number of plugins. Any plugin which is not in use right now should be removed immediately.

8. Reduce Number of Redirects

While redirects are important to eliminate 404 errors or when you have some outdated content and you want to redirect visitors to the updated one, still we at cheapandbesthosting.com we often suggest our visitors to reduce the number.

Google suggest removing them as much as possible.

9.  Check your website speed periodically

Use tools like Pingdom.com, GTMetrix.com and periodically check your website speed.

You will notice that your servers and pages will not perform the same always.

Even if the speed is fixed by you today, you will notice some of your pages not perform well after some time.

This is mainly due to various external factors like DNS and Web host performance.

10. Minimize number of Requests (HTTP) –

Chrome browser or any other browser asks for various requests from your server which ultimately increases the page load time.

HTTP requests are always a load for browser to process and server to deliver.

Without doing any other rocket science, simply by reducing the number of HTTP requests, you will see a significant improvement in the speed.

Conclusion

It is important to ensure that your website loads faster. Every page when opens up quickly, it will be a wow factor to your visitors.

Repeat visitors will surely increase if your website is loading on time. If you have an affiliate website or e-commerce store, it is always good to work upon the same.

While it is an important ranking factor too, we must ensure simple ways mentioned above to ensure the same.

Not only on search results, even for paid traffic campaigns, it is a win-win situation for both visitors and for you to improve your page load speed. More and more visits and low drop rate will ensure higher revenues.

Consider using a good host suggested by cheapandbesthosting.com and optimize your page well by compressing files and reducing requests etc.

About the Author-

Vishesh Gupta

Founder - Cheapandbesthosting.com

(Entrepreneur, WEB Host Reviewer & Consultant)