Improve your website speed with four simple steps
How frustrated are you when you are at a restaurant and the table which ordered after you receive its food before yours? In today’s age of virtually instant gratification, the average person does not have the patience to wait. Whether it is waiting to be served, or waiting for the webpage to load, patience runs thin and the average user expects immediate results.
Something as small as a one-second delay for site loading time can yield the following:
- 11% reduction in page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss of lead conversions/sales
Some clients come to us after spending a good bit of time and money on web design only to find out that the site takes too long to load. Site speed should not be confused with page speed. Site speed is the speed at which your site loads as users go through it. Page speed is the time it takes for the page in question to load and display all its contents. It's like having to wait at a store for a salesperson to answer your questions so you can make your decision. Having to wait for the salesperson, or in today’s world, the page to display the information can be aggravating.
Though both page and site speed should be optimized, page speed is crucial for a positive user experience. Longer load time is shown to have higher bounce rates.
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?ARE YOU REFERRING TO SITE SPEED OR PAGE SPEED? YOU ARE GOING BACK AND FORTH. PLEASE BE CLEAR.
Optimizing both is an involved task and some knowledge of the tools available to deliver good results. If you are interested in hiring us to improve your site speed or page speed, leave us a comment below or contact us. (CAN YOU MAKE THIS A LINK?)
Four steps to increase your page speed score:
- Compress images
Images make up an average of 21% of your web page's overall weight. Reduce your image’s file size to improve the website’s performance. Try these tools:
Our favorite plugin to use is WP Smush Image Compression and Optimization:
It will reduce hidden information from the images and reduce size in proportion to your layout without compromising quality. The plugin scans through all images (old and new) and compresses JPEG, GIF, and PNG image types up to 50 files at a time.
2. User browser caching
Browser caching is one of Google’s top recommendations for increasing page speed. Without caching, repeat visitors will be subjected to reloading the entire page content each time the user visits your site. Set up reasonable expiration dates for your cache.
W3 Total Cache helps speed up your website by reducing the download time and reduces loading time. This tool also minifies the HTML (which we will talk next), JS, and CSS by helping you save 80% on your bandwidth without any coding requirement.
Minify your HTML
Minifying helps speed up download & parse times. This simplifies how servers read or interpret the codes within your CSS & HTML coding on your site.
This involves fixing, formatting, removing, and shortening codes when possible. Download HTML Minify free and install it on your website. The whole process takes seconds and you will see a dramatic improvement to your page speed. (AGAIN, IS THIS PAGE SPEED OR SITE SPEED?)
Implement AMP
Did you know that Google has rolled out accelerated mobile pages (AMP) designed to enable pages to load quickly on mobile devices?
AMP is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-backed project created to allow publishers to avoid clunky features that generally don’t work well on smartphones. This plugin creates a more streamlined and pleasant user experience while reducing page speed to under one second.
Have you tested your website speed or your page speed lately? Click here for a test and a free report.