3 Simple Steps to Boost Your Website Speed

This competitive digital age makes website speed a paramount factor to online retention rates. If your website takes even just a few seconds too long, it’s likely a potential viewer will already resort to a different site. It’s shown that a slow website frustrates the user experience, and it certainly deters visitors from that site in the future.

On the bright side, there are many ways to reverse this problem and expedite your site’s speed. To keep it easy, here are three tips you can apply right now to conquer the hidden culprits slowing down your site.

Minimal http requests

Each time a web user clicks on the link for your site, an http request is sent to collect and download the various components that make up your site. Simply put- more components to your site equal a longer duration for the download process.

Inspect the amount of requests your site sends to the server and identify how many files it actually includes. Consider what files you can do without and get rid of them to focus on the factor that actually helps, which is quicker site speed. It’s probable that once files are eliminated, some of what’s left can be combined.

Combine files

Think of combing files as the second phase of minimizing http requests. After disposing of unnecessary files, it’s beneficial to combine what you can. Combine files like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and notice the changes. As a result, witness the size and number of files on your site decrease. To take it a step further, dive into your site’s coding and remove any extra spaces, indents, line breaks, or other unnecessary elements that drag out load time.

Optimize Image Files

Image files are especially large server requests, which make for a slower load process. Luckily, reducing the size of the file allows you to keep the image and rid requests that slow down the page load. Once you upload the desired image, crop it accordingly to the size you’d like it to appear on the page. By cropping the image rather than adjusting the width parameter to a smaller image size, you reduce the time your server spends modifying that image each time it loads. Essentially, you’ll have the exact same image, just as a smaller filer.

The greatest way to increase your website speed is to make sure you work smarter, not harder. All of these tips are simple, easy, and create a nice starting point to further your process of an efficient site load time. Think about your website improvements as cleaning out a cabinet; you’re eliminating anything you don’t need or use and optimizing the space left over.

Not only does speeding up your site welcome more potential users, it can also influence your site ranking. Among several other factors, Google uses load time to determine the rank of your site. With these three easy steps, you’ll notice immediate improvements in customer satisfaction and raise your chances at a higher ranking from Google. For other ways to optimize your website and improve load time, contact Kraus Marketing and see how our web professionals can help.