Slow Website? Here’s How You Can Improve The Page Load Speed

A slow-loading website is one of the pet peeves of web visitors. It’s a major turn-off, seriously. And if it is not pleasing to them, it is not going to help your business either. Statistics suggest that even a one-second delay in the page load speed can decrease the conversion rate by 7% and page views by 11%. Google did a case study in 2017 and found out that a website’s bounce rate may increase by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.

This was five years back. Imagine how much importance website speed would be carrying in 2022. But, the truth is, there are still many websites that aren’t optimized for speed. Backlinko analyzed 5.2 million desktop and mobile pages and found that the average time for an entire web page to load was 10.3 seconds and 27.3 seconds on desktop and mobile, respectively.

Users want the pages to load faster. That’s their primary preference when they land on a website, not the products and services it contains. If they are stuck for longer than usual on a webpage, they will bounce off straightaway, severely affecting your KPIs.

Having a fast website has many advantages. Not only does it improve your bottom line but also helps in ranking well on the SERPs. A study by Unbounce reveals that around 70% of consumers admit that the page load speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

If you are on this blog post, it won’t be wrong of us to assume that you are troubled by the slowness of your website. Nevertheless, we will help you with it. Today, we will discuss the different ways through which you can improve the page load speed of your website.

Also Read: 8 Effective Ways To Improve Customer Experience On Your Website

6 Ways to Improve Your Website Speed

Although there are plenty of ways to improve your website’s speed, we will walk you through the best six tips that will significantly decrease your page load time.

1. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Files

A website is a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The more the number of files, the more will be HTTP requests, and hence the longer it will take for the page to render. One way to speed up your website is by reducing the number of files. This means removing unnecessary characters, comments, spaces, or any other inessential elements.

Minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code and combing them not only reduces the total number of files but also the size of each file. This would create lesser HTTP requests and enable faster page loading. There are tools that can help you minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, such as Autoptimize and WillPeavy.

2. Consider Asynchronous Loading for CSS and JavaScript Files

CSS and JavaScript files load either synchronously or asynchronously. The former means that the files or scripts would be loaded one at a time, in the order they appear on the page. Put simply, the browser, upon encountering a script, will stop loading the other elements on the page until that file has been fully loaded first. The latter means that multiple scripts would be loaded simultaneously, and this helps in accelerating the page load speed.

When a browser loads a page, the sequence followed is top to bottom. While doing so if it comes across a synchronous file, the loading would be paused until that file gets fully loaded. If that same file was an asynchronous file, there wouldn’t have been any disruption in the loading. The browser would have continued loading other elements on the page at the same time.

Also Read: How to Convert Your Website Into a Great Mobile App?

3. Enable Caching

When you visit a website or a web page for the very first time, the elements on that page (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files) get stored on the hard drive or on some temporary storage in the form of cache. However, on subsequent visits to that page, the entire elements but a few need not be downloaded again. What this does is whenever you visit that webpage again, the browser will load the page without having to send the HTTP request to the server. Simply put, the browser would not have to reload the entire webpage. This significantly reduces the page load time (since there’s no fresh HTTP request). Caching is, however, helpful only for returning visitors. That being said, it’s important to speed up the website for first-time visitors.

There are several page caching tools and plugins that you can use to enable browser caching. For instance, if your website is hosted on WordPress, you can use W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket.

4. Optimize the Website Images

Graphics or images are one of those things that make a website aesthetically pleasing. And if you are into an eCommerce business, images are the mainstay of your website. These images, however, can also be the reason behind the slowness of your website. This doesn’t mean that you start removing the images to make your web pages load faster. Images are necessary. The ideal option is to compress those images. Image files are usually large in size and thus can take time to load. By reducing the size of the images, the web pages tend to load faster. Find out the appropriate image size for your web page, choose the right format (JPG or PNG), and crop it if possible. Many tools are available online that can compress the image file size by up to 80% and still maintain the image quality.

5. Switch to a Better Hosting Provider

Your website hosting platform can significantly affect your website’s page load speed. When building a website, new site owners usually go with the cheapest hosting solution in order to pay a lower monthly charge. But this can result in poor website performance as a cheap host may share resources between multiple websites on an overloaded server, which can slow down the speed of your web pages.

Upgrading your web hosting package would not only improve your website’s performance and speed but also help you to deal with more web traffic in the future.

You have three options to choose from when looking for web hosting- Shared hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated server. Shared hosting is the most popular of the three and is the best option for new website owners or websites with low traffic. As you start receiving more traffic, you can consider moving to VPS hosting or the Dedicated server.

If you are currently using shared hosting and have started receiving high traffic of late, it can be the reason for your website turning slow. Move it to a better host as soon as possible.

6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Besides using a server that hosts your website, you can leverage a CDN to decrease the load time for your visitors. A Content Delivery Network (CDN), also referred to as a Content Distribution Network is a network of web servers distributed worldwide and provides the content to the visitors as per their location. What a CDN does is it hosts and delivers copies of your website’s static content from servers located across the globe, thereby enabling faster loading of web pages.

Let us make it simpler for you to understand. For users who are at a far location from your server, load times would be higher because the information has to travel a long distance. With a CDN, the distance the data requests have to travel between the browsers and the host’s servers gets minimized. The website is cached on a global network of servers. When a user’s browser sends data requests from your site, they are routed to the closest server. As a result, the content is delivered faster to the user.

Final Thoughts

A fast-loading website sets the foundation for your business. If users are not having a pleasant experience on your website in terms of page load speed, they would likely abandon it. And this can have a severe impact on your conversions.

Use the above-mentioned six tips to improve the loading speed of your web pages. As we also mentioned using some plugins for that matter, we would also advise you to remove the unnecessary plugins from your website. Having too many plugins can cause unnecessary delays in page loading.