A website’s loading speed is a signaling factor when ranking web pages. A site that loads up slowly loses the chance to appear on top of search engine result pages.
Besides ranking, loading speeds affect your users’ experiences, and it is also an important part of search engine optimization. With recent studies pointing to the fact that a second-long delay in a web page’s loading speed results in an 11 percent drop in page views. One second slower than your competition and the customer satisfaction drops by 16 percent, resulting in 7 percent loss in lead conversions. In short, it affects your ROI. At Fixt Wireless, and in all other companies around, the big question becomes, how do you increase website loading speeds?
With Google on marketers’ necks, and you, on the other hand, trying to load complex and heavy content, you have to be aware of tricks for improving loading speeds despite the heavy content.
First, you have to work with a proficient web development partner who can implement actions to ensure that your website is fast and updated.
Actionable tweaks to improve loading speeds:
- Embed from a third-party hosting platform
- You can use Wistia or Vimeo to embed without impacting your server’s bandwidth.
- Compress the videos: you may want to have the high definition videos but, they are big hogs. Find an appropriate tool to compress the video.
- Limiting the number of total assets/ elements on every page
- More images or videos on a page negatively affects your loading speeds. While sliders, carousels, large images and background images enhance aesthetics, they also increase speeds. But, you have to find a balance.
Minimize HTTP Requests
HTTP requests take longer to load
Reduce the server’s response time
This refers to how fast a page loads and the time a DNS lookup takes. A DNS, also called the domain name system is the server with a database of IP addresses plus their associated host names. When typing in a URL in a browser, the DNS server translates the URL into an IP address indicating its location online. It’s a lot like a computer looking up a number in phone book.
Optimize your images and videos
These are the biggest culprits that affect a site’s loading speeds. Images and videos take up a significant amount of space.
In relation to videos and images, you have to check the size of the elements, and the total elements (assets) on a page.
To reduce the size of the media assets
Appropriate sizing of the images: you have to resize your breathtaking 12MPx image or the 6000 pixel-wide image into a 500px image. Keep the parameters of the design in mind.
Use JPG images: JPG images are compressed images that maintain the integrity of the images, without wasting space. You should avoid BMP and TIFF images.
Always compress the photos: every photo appropriately resized can still be large. So, ensure that you reduce the size of the image – as long as you don’t compromise the quality of the image.
Leverage page speed plugin and caching
Depending on your CMS, modules, and plugins exist that can do the heavy lifting, increasing the loading speeds.
Cached pages work as static HTML versions of pages, and they are there to prevent time-consuming queries on websites. Cached web pages load faster, and they decrease the server’s load. WordPress has caching plugins.
Other speed optimization techniques include:
- Enabling browser caching
- Minifying resources (CSS, JS, HTML)
- LazyLoading videos and images
- Removal of query strings from the static resources
- Loading CSS files asynchronously
- Optimizing the database
Upgrading your web hosting package
Your hosting package influences the loading speeds negatively or positively. Even though shared hosting platforms are tempting, you should invest in high-powered VPS, dedicated or managed web hosting platform.
With slow websites as negative ranking factors, you should do everything you can to boost your site’s loading speeds. Note that about 40 percent of consumers leave sites that take more than 3 seconds to load.