One of the most effective tools available to any business owner in 2021 is the internet. This can be for driving sales, expanding reach, or ensuring customer retention. There are many different ways that businesses can use the internet to draw people to their website, including creating SEO-optimized content, paid advertising, or engaging with people on social media.
That being said, whilst the importance of getting people to your website seems to be prevalent in many businesses marketing strategies, ensuring that the website they are being directed to works well with little delays seems to be overlooked. A website’s performance is crucial when it comes to converting clicks to sales, as a one-second delay in a websites page speed could lead to:
Not only that, but Google now takes speed into consideration when ranking sites. This means if you put a lot of time and effort into creating content that will allow you to rank higher on google, it could prove a moot exercise if your page speed is slow. So, what are some of the most effective ways to improve the performance of your website?
Minimize HTTP Requests
Yahoo recently confirmed that around 80% of a website’s loading time derives from the amount of time it takes to download parts of the page. The parts include the likes of images, scripts, stylesheets, and videos. To download any of these aspects, an HTTP request must be made.
On your website, if you go to ‘Inspect’ followed by ‘network’, the ‘name’ column displays the separate files that each page is running, the ‘size’ column will then confirm the size of each of these files while ‘time’ will give an indication as to how long it takes to load these files. Be sure to erase any elements that are not necessary for that web page, as this will increase your loading speed.
Use Cloud Based Computing
When we consider cloud-based computing, we don’t often associate it with speed, rather with data back-up and security; however, it can also be an incredibly effective tool for speeding up website loading times, especially if your site frequently uses photos and videos. The best way to do this is by building another website that can be used to access video and photo galleries remotely. The overall load time would be significantly lower as the web browser would not be requesting content from the same server.
Many are hesitant to use cloud-based computing as they believe it to be too complicated. The fact is, the cloud can be incredibly easy to use, and it’s also easy to learn how to use it thanks to A Cloud Guru. This site offers cloud computing courses for multiple different servers, so you can use the one which benefits your site the most.
Run Compression Audits
This should become a regular practice as it is an effective means to get files on your website as small as possible (which will mean they load faster) without sacrificing any overall quality. Any page that uses a large number of images, videos, or script will be larger, so it would be good practice to try compressing them.
There are multiple platforms available that will help you check whether a file is compressed simply by entering the URL of a specific page into it.