7 Ways to Boost Your Website Loading Speed

There are dozens of research reports that prove the fact that a fast-loading website is crucial for the success of a business/website today. Nobody likes a slow site. Users tend to abandon sites that take long to load and search engines dock a few points. The result – a negative impact on your business and brand reputation. Hence, having a website that loads within the blink of an eye is essential for success. Today, we are going to share seven tips to help you boost your website’s loading speed.

Before we begin, do you know the loading speed of your website? Many site owners are guilty of not staying in control of this important aspect of their site’s performance. If you have never measured the loading speed, then use one of the free online tools like Pingdom, Webwait, Octagate, Loadimpact, etc. to find it now! Or, you can use Google’s free Website Speed Test to determine your current page loading speed and get suggestions to improve it.

If the speed test tells you that your site is taking too long to load, then here are some tips to help you:

1.  Choose the right web host

The online world is overcrowded with millions of websites vying for the attention of users. While aggressive and targeted marketing and promotional activities and social media platforms can succeed in getting traffic to your website, if the user experience does not meet the expectations, then all the effort can be rendered useless and earn you a bad reputation. Hence, it is important to focus on the loading speed of your website above everything else.

While a lot of factors contribute to the speed of the website, the hosting services play a crucial role. Since the site resides on a web server, the performance of the server can determine the speed of the website. Hence, choose a hosting type and provider that is focused on delivering high-speed websites. Assess the hosting needs of your website and research the market well before buying. For example, you can opt for VPS Hosting in India with SSD from a provider with a track record of offering high-speed websites. Further, an SSD-based Virtual Private Server offers many features that can help boost the speed and performance of your website.

2. Image Optimization

Digital cameras and high-end mobile cameras have taken photography to an entirely new level. Today, online users expect websites to have high-resolution images. However, higher resolution usually means heavier files and slow loading time. How does one work around this predicament? The answer is image optimization. There are several tools that allow you to optimize your images for the internet without losing quality.

3. Minify JavaScript & CSS

Clean the JavaScript and CSS codes on your website. This can lead to faster site performance.

4. Enable browser caching

Browser caching is a technique to reduce the loading time of your website by enabling the browser to save a copy of regularly requested site elements like images, stylesheets, etc. Hence, when the user visits the site again, the elements are not downloaded from the server but used from the stored (cached) version.

5. Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network or CDN is a network of servers with a copy of your website on each server. This network is spread across different geographies. Hence, when a user visits your website, the server closest to them jumps into action and fulfils the request. This reduces the loading time of your website.

6. Enable Compression

Most of us are aware of the concept of zipping files. It is smaller and can be transferred easily. A website transfers files from the web server to the user’s terminal. If you enable GZip compression, then you can reduce the size of the files making the transfer faster and reducing the loading time of your site.

7. Avoid Synchronous Code

Many times, we add code to our website to track users/ads. While adding the code, we get an option to choose synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous means that your site will not load completely until the code has loaded. If the code connects to a third-party server, then this means that the speed of your website depends on the third-party server. Hence, always ensure that you use asynchronous code on your site.

Conclusion

Remember, in the current competitive times, there can be no valid excuse for a slow site. In fact, users and search engines have no tolerance for slow-loading websites. Hence, start working on improving your site speed and find the perfect web hosting service to reduce the loading time of your site. Good Luck!