There Are No Speeding Tickets Online

4 ways to make your website run as fast as possible

Here’s a question for you: how long are you willing to wait for a website to load before you click away? Five seconds? Ten seconds? 20 seconds?

You might be surprised to learn that a study by Forrester Consulting found that the average internet user will wait no more than three seconds for a website to load before abandoning it.

So, if your website and landing pages take any longer than that you could be missing out on valuable leads (you can test your page load speeds here).

Don’t worry though. There are four simple steps you can take to decrease your load times (even if you’re not a coder or technical person).

Get a good hosting plan

If you’re already a Leadpages user you don’t have to worry about hosting. Your websites and landing pages are hosted on our servers (even if you connect a custom domain) and?our page load speeds are faster than the industry average.

However, if your site isn’t hosted with Leadpages then the easiest way to speed things up is to upgrade your hosting plan.

Most entry-level plans force you to share server space with other sites. These plans can usually only handle a limited amount of traffic before they start to slow down.

If you notice your page load times increasing you might want to look into virtual private server (VPS), cloud, or dedicated hosting plans.

Compress your images

Images are often the largest files hosted on your website. So, if you can minimize the time it takes to load your images it will go a long way toward speeding up your website.

The easiest way to do this is to decrease the size of your images. Website images generally don’t need to be any bigger than 2,500 px wide. So if you have an image that’s larger than this it’s a good idea to resize it.

There are also image compression apps available that reduce the file size of images without sacrificing quality. If you use WordPress, plugins like WP Smush will do this for any images you upload to your website.

Don’t host videos on your website

The only file type that’s even worse for your load times than images is video. These files are massive and will seriously bog down your site.

If you have a video you want to feature on your website your first thought might be to upload it directly to your site. But if you do this your website will have to load that massive file every time someone visits.

Instead, upload your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia and embed them on the page. These services have massive amounts of servers and will load your videos much faster.

Reduce your WordPress plugins

If you use WordPress for your website you should take a close look at your plugins. Plugins are great for adding functionality, but they’re notorious for slowing down your site.

Review all your plugins and delete any that you’re not currently using. Try to keep your total plugins to 20 or fewer.

Are you ready to make your website faster than ever? Apply these tips to your pages to reduce your load times and increase your conversions!

Create a Website That Works For Your Business 24/7

Tired of WordPress overwhelm and template confusion? Learn how to create a business website that collects leads and closes sales for you through actionable training. Click here to get started!