For those who do not give enough attention to their website speed and do not put in the work in optimizing its speed end up losing money.
You might be thinking how can a website with a low loading speed cost money?
If a website only gets loaded one second late than the user expected it to be, it will not only result in fewer visits but also you will face a 7% decrease in conversion rate.
All the things I mentioned can be terrible for your website especially the decrease in conversion rate.
Not only that but if a website has a low loading speed, it also leaves a bad image in the mind of people who visit it, and they might not come to it again.
Disadvantages do not come to end here. Having a slow loading time for your website will also leave behind you in the race of SEO.
Yes, because the loading time of a website is also a factor considered by google while deciding the ranking of a website.
And the good news is that improving the website speed is not as hard as doing other tasks like improving conversion rate.
Even your amazing content will be of no use if visitors cannot open your website.
What is website speed?
The speed to which pages of a website load on the browser of users is referred to as the website speed.
What is website speed optimization?
The process of increasing the speed of a website by applying various methods and knowledge of doing it is called website speed optimization.
What can be considered a good loading time?
Knowing what a good loading time is is very important if you want to optimize the loading time of your speed.
Because without knowing it, how will you be able to set your goals for setting goals for improving website speed?
Google itself has provided this data telling that a website that has a good loading time should be under 3 seconds.
Google after doing a study of almost a million pages found that more than half of the pages on the internet have more than double the loading time of what is considered a good loading time.
So there is a high chance that your website might be on one of those websites which have double the loading time of a good loading time.
Factors affecting the speed of a website.
There are a lot of factors affecting the speed of a website, such as how many images there are on a website and most importantly the size of those images.
Another factor that affects the speed of your website includes the location of users who are visiting your website around the globe.
Because if a user is too far away from your servers, it will take more time to load that website.
The more images there are on a webpage, the more time it will take to load.
Optimize images on a webpage
A lot of people who do not know the effect of images on the speed of a website use raw images without trying to make their size lower.
This can increase loading time as it will take more time to load those raw images as compared to if they were optimized and had lower sizes.
Customizing the size of images so they fit with the UI of your website can also help in lowering the loading time of your speed.
You should also be careful when you are using images on your website.
Because if you do not care about the number of images you are using and do not use images efficiently, you will most probably end up using a lot of images.
So to avoid this, use images that will do more work and will not require you to add any more images.
This might take more time for you to add images that can describe more than one topic but it will be a lot better for the speed of your website.
After making images, make sure you do not add them in raw form.
Use some tools to optimize those images and now they will be faster to load for visitors.
You may also want to lower the resolution of your images which will make them even lighter.
Just make sure you do not lower their resolution too low that they become too low quality but do not make their quality too high as well when you do not need it.
Choose a good hosting provider with a fast speed
When you are making your website, one of the first steps you will be taking will be to choose a hosting provider.
The most common type of hosting servers that are being used by people for their websites are shared hosting and VPS or virtual private server.
Shared hosting the name of it is a server on which a lot of websites are hosted. These servers are just a little bit cheaper than VPS ones but you will start facing problems once your website traffic will grow.
On the other hand, there are VPS servers that are just a little bit more costly than shared hosting but their advantages are more worth that extra little bit of cost.
They offer website speed higher than that of the shared hosting and they will also be able to manage the website speed even after traffic grows.
VPS hosting providers like Contabo provide VPS servers at lower prices but at the best performances for the price.
But there is even a better option if you are making a landing page and want to improve its speed and that is to choose a good landing page builder such as leadpages, not only will you be able to build high converting landing pages but those pages will also be lightning fast. So for making landing pages, if you want high speed you should choose leadpages.
There are other VPS providers as well such as Vultr but it depends on you which one you choose.
Just make sure you do proper research before choosing a hosting provider as for beginners changing your hosting providers, later on, can be a little bit complex.
Reduce HTTP requests.
Https requests can be explained as the data sent to your browser when you request it by visiting a domain name or URL.
The data that is sent to the user’s browser includes various files such as images, CSS files, etc.
Now the lower number of these files, the lower the number of HTTP requests will be made.
You can do this by optimizing those CSS and JS files.
Solve geographical location problems
When you are choosing a hosting plan for your website, you are also asked to choose the geographical location of the physical server on which your website will be hosted.
But the problem is that in whichever location you chose your physical servers, the problem is that users from one location will face a slow loading time for your website.
To solve this problem, You can use CDN which will provide servers for your website at different locations.
This will make your website loading speed lower even at that location from where previously your server was far away.
Utilize features of browser caching.
Browser caching can be a very useful feature for your website when it comes loading speed of your website.
Browser caching is a temporary storage area where various files of a website are stored for a temporary amount of time.
In this way, when users will visit your website, the loading time of your website will be significantly improved because it will have to load all those website files as they were already available in the browser cache.
To use this feature, if your website is on WordPress, you can use plugins as there are a lot of WordPress plug-ins available for this purpose.
Utilize expired headers.
Expired headers are another feature that to some extent is similar to that of browser caching.
By using expire headers, it will tell the browser that instead of loading all those website files, which may take a lot of time it can directly take those files from the cache.
This will lower loading time as the files will be taken from the cache by using expire header instead of loading those files.
Not only that but the expired headers will also be instructing the user browser for how long those files should remain in the cache which also limits the cache as well.
Choose a fast DNS provider.
When you are typing in the name of a website, you will just think that this URL will directly lead to the website you are expecting it to.
Well, that might seem right from the front end but from the backend, this is a completely different story.
A DNS is a storage system that stores IP addresses and also the hosting servers to which they are connected.
That DNS is the thing that will be going to translate the domain name or the URL that you type into the IP addresses which will be connected to the IP address of that website.
After that, it will take your browser to the server connected with the IP address which was translated from a URL or a domain name by your DNS.
This process is not instant and it takes time like everything while loading a website.
The faster your DNS will be in translating the IP address from the domain or URL, and leading the computer to the connected server, the lower the loading speed of your website will be.
This means that you should be as careful while choosing a DNS provider as you would have been while choosing a hosting provider.
Verizon and DNSmadeEasy are top DNS providers if we line them up to their loading speed.
Do compression audit
As I have talked earlier in this article that compressing files in your website is one of the best methods for increasing the speed of your website.
But this might get a little bad if you compress some files too much and do not compress other files at all or you do not know how much you should compress your website files.
Because in the end, you will never want to downgrade the quality of your website files which can ruin the user experience.
To know all of these things, You can simply run an audit compression test by using the GIDnetwork.
The compression test will not only tell you which files have not been compressed and which have been compressed but it will also tell you how much you can compress your files without losing quality over your website files.
Utilize external hosting servers for your website
Using videos and especially tutorial videos on your website is a great way to increase your website conversion rate and time spent by people on it after visiting it.
While this may seem great but it can be terrible for the hosting servers of your website.
Because most probably you will be using shared hosting servers for your website or VPS ones and both of them will not be giving you unlimited space.
So adding a video, especially those which are lengthier and are of high quality can not only take up a big part of space but also may even exceed the limit of space given to you.
This can affect the performance of your website to a large extent.
So it is better if you post that video on another platform like Youtube and after doing that, embed the video on your website,
This does not mean that you will always have to use Youtube, no you can use other platforms as well such as Westia but the advantage with youtube is that it has a larger user base and your video will be spread to most people.
Conclusion
Website speed can be a deciding factor for the revenue of your website but as many people do not know this, this lack of knowledge leads them to ignore website speed.
Which in return can cost them money.
Even after knowing how website speed can impact the conversion rate of your website and other important factors related to website revenue, still You may struggle with optimizing the speed of your website.
After applying the mentioned methods, you will see a visual difference in the speed of your website.
While some methods work more effectively than other, it is still better to apply most of them as every second of your website loading speed can decide the revenue of your website.