Website speed can be tricky. Everybody knows it’s essential, but it is still one of the most misunderstood website aspects. So how do you know if your website needs to be faster? Learn how to speed up your website and improve its performance with the smartest tips & steps infographic.
Well, this is tricky too. Research has shown that owners are bad at intuitively determining the speed of their websites. Load times seem shorter to them. On the other hand, visitors experience the opposite effect—load times appear longer.
Your best bet, then, is to find a tool for checking website performance. A simple Google search is enough, as numerous free tools do this. So what is your target speed? Expert opinion coming directly from the Hosting Tribunal recommends that your pages should load in 3 seconds.
This might seem ridiculous fast, but research supports it. Of course, online, faster is always better. So, making your website as quickly as possible is a good policy. However, there is a reason for recommending the 3-second load time.
Websites slower than this suffer significant drawbacks. Losing visitors is one downside—54% leave a page that loads for longer than 3 seconds. Even the visitors that stay will visit fewer total pages.
Speed up Your Website Infographic
Speed is also essential for online store owners. Longer load times also mean lower conversion rates and lower customer loyalty, significantly if the load time exceeds the three-second mark. Slowness affects SEO too.
Slow web pages get penalized by the Google search ranking algorithm and score lower in searches. Visitors leaving a page quickly due to slow speeds also lowers that page’s rank. Both mean much less traffic.
It is plain that website speed is a crucial factor for online success. Knowing this, you can now improve your website’s load times. Or, if you want to learn more, you can learn about the benefits of improving website performance in the infographic below. Learn how to speed up your website and improve its performance with the smartest tips & steps infographic.
Audit your website: Speed up website infographic
Before altering anything that has an effect on the way your website loads or handles content, it’s worth evaluating its current state.
To begin, you can utilize a free tool like PageSpeed Insights. It will evaluate your Core Web Vitals on mobile (default) or desktop and let you know if you passed.
Additionally, it will provide a numerical score that indicates the overall performance of your site, as well as opportunities for improvement.
Our assessment should also take experience into account: try accessing your website from multiple devices and observe what the experience is like. Is it efficient and fast, or cumbersome and laborious?
The more information you have about your website’s functions, the better equipped you are to identify and implement necessary fixes.
Prioritize Potential Solutions
Once you’ve identified issues with the website speed, it’s tempting to attempt to rectify everything at once. Even if you had unlimited resources and time, we wouldn’t advocate this method. Learn how to speed up your website and improve its performance with the smartest tips & steps infographic.
Instead, attempt to focus on potential fixes based on the most important visitors to your site. For instance, if your website takes a significant amount of time to load, your focus should be on issues that are server-based, such as issues with the hosting provider or the DNS.
This is more important even if the content on your website also has a slow loading time visitors will instead leave if the page takes too long to load.
Other tools that provide recommendations and diagnostics regarding page speed can also help prioritize your efforts.
For instance, if you were to examine the following list, you would prioritize reducing the amount of main-thread work the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS over avoiding large layout changes.
Examine your current web hosting provider
As previously mentioned, your web hosting service provider could lead to speed issues. Several factors can contribute to the issue of speed, including the geographical location of your web host, their physical infrastructure, and the bandwidth of their network connection. Learn how to speed up your website and improve its performance with the smartest tips & steps infographic.
The type of web hosting your website is using can also affect performance.
Three common varieties are shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting.
- Shared hosting: Although shared hosting is the most cost-effective option, it decreases performance overall because of the large number of sites it distributes resources across. This will be problematic if your website has high traffic or a spike in traffic consistently.
- VPS: Virtual private server (VPS) options physically split services into logical partitions that have a performance boost, but still have a limited capacity if the number of users is high.
- Dedicated: Dedicated servers are more expensive than shared or VPS options, but they will have a significant impact on your speed, even if there is a lot of traffic.
