People are so used to getting everything they need at an instant now. Regardless of how unique your website design and content is, a slow-loading site would not be tolerable for an impatient viewer. Therefore, if you want your website to be highly functional, your priority should also include its page load speed.
Many online speed tests can help you assess the performance of your site. The ideal website load time should be two to five seconds.
If you’ve confirmed that you need to help improve your site’s loading performance, we have five solutions to help you achieve that.
1: Choose Your Hosting Site Well
The performance of your host site impacts the loading of your website. For instance, if you acquired a shared hosting plan and the other website you shared the site with has a surge in traffic, your site performance could also be affected by it. Therefore, make sure you find a reliable provider. Should you have an existing website host already, remember that you can always change and explore other options.
2: Optimise Your Images
No one wants to see a low-resolution image on any online platform nowadays. The use of one simply makes a site unprofessional or not at all attractive and exciting. However, it is an unavoidable element on a site, especially when people want to see how things look first before they get engaged in reading the message.
You can still use high-resolution images for your site, but it would be best if you know how to optimise them for your site’s fast performance. Photos that are too big can consume a lot of bandwidth when uploading, so find the ideal size for an online viewing setting. Changing the file format, for example, can make a huge difference.
3: Limit Your Site’s Redirection
Indeed, redirection is a helpful tool on a website. It ensures that your web visitors do not end up on a 404 page when surfing your site. However, there should be a limit when it comes to utilising this function. Too much redirection can affect your site’s loading time. When your page redirects to another page, the whole process prolongs the HTTP request and makes your website load slower. If you think you have a problem with this, consider limiting the redirection to only those relevant pages.
4: Utilise Caching Techniques
Caching is the process of storing the frequently used data points in your machine or browser’s cached memory. This method can help improve your website performance drastically since there is already a ‘shortcut’ method of how the website should do its job well. With this in place, loading the same content would be more straightforward for the website.
5: Minify Your Codes
Codes are essentially the backbone of your website. However, it could also be the reason for its slow performance, especially when the site is heavy on CSS, JavaScript and HTML codes. Decreasing its size can help speed up your website, but it does not mean you need to delete any of them.
Deleting the unnecessary elements such as unnecessary spaces, characters and comments can help, though. Doing this is called minifying, and it is a step you must not forget when managing your website. Combining all codes can also help you achieve a cleaner and lighter weight code.
Conclusion
By starting with these five steps, your website loading speed would significantly improve. Put these tips in mind when designing your website. They could help improve your website performance and increase the satisfaction of your web visitors. Working with experienced and knowledgeable web designers would also help you avoid page load problems since they know the dos and don’ts regarding web design.
If you are looking for reliable and affordable web design services, Online Designs UK can give you beautiful, modern-looking, fast and highly functional sites at cost-effective prices. We are a two-person team based in St Neots with more than 10 years of experience helping local businesses get their website running. Contact us today so we can start helping you with yours!