The 3 Best Ways To Speed Up Your Website
No one wants to wait around for something. Waiting in line to buy groceries, or put gas, or even just buying some food at McDonalds or other fast food restaurant. Waiting for something sucks.
The same applies to websites. If you have a website, and it is slow to appear for your website visitors, those same visitors will no longer go to your website. They’ll spend less time reading and clicking around, because it takes so long to load.
Data has shown, on an average Ecommerce site, every second above 2 that it takes to fully load a website, your conversion ratio will drop by 7%. That is actual money being left on the table.
Our web development team compiled a few quick tips on how to speed up your website. Below are the top 3 we came up with, that are also applied to our own websites.
1 — Caching
When you cache elements of a page, it means a static page is generated. What does that mean? It means your website pages no longer need to connect to your database every time someone looks at them.
We’ve found the typical caching mechanism can speed your website up to 50%. Our own caching systems can speed up a website by up to 125%. A website that takes 2 seconds to load on average, can load in under 0.8 seconds after caching is enabled.
Page caching is the easiest thing to set up as most caching plugins will work right out of the box.
2 — Optimization
If you have a lot of images on one page, it means you have too many on one page. Images are usually what cause pages to load very slow, as browsers tend to load the entire page, instead of image by image.
Large images should be optimized for the web. This means compressing them using WordPress plugins or online services that exist. Most website images should not be larger than 100kb, and only 3 to 5 per page. This will give your website a very solid speed boost and your visitors more reasons to click around.
3 — Review 3rd party trackers and links
The last reason most websites can load slowly, is due to 3rd party trackers and scripts. For example, every time your website visitor loads a page on your website, it can connect to Google Analytics, chat services, trackers, and other sometimes useful tools.
If you have too many connections to external resources, this will definitely affect the page loading speed of your site, since each external resource needs to load first, and then your own page will load.
Make sure you review how many external resources you’re using.
We hope these tips help your website load faster!
Original Source: https://skystra.com/blog/the-3-best-ways-to-speed-up-your-website/
