Does Website Speed Really Matters?
Speeding up your website is one of the foremost important factors which will offer you an enormous advantage over your competitors with slower loading times. Each and every user wishes to load pages in 3 seconds or less. The main reason behind this is many visitors will reject your site if the site is not loading in 3 seconds. Slow websites will have a coffee number of conversions, a high bounce rate, and a coffee number of pages per visit. Hence, if your site takes fewer seconds to load, the better will be the visitors on your site. For this reason, Google has made site speed a ranking factor.
As your website’s reaction time features a huge effect on user engagement we are exerting to beat the hurdles of large images, script-heavy themes, and WordPress plugins that add needed functionality.
Why does a site slow down?
Let us check a few factors that may be the reason for slowing down your website speed:
1) Caching Issues
2) Overloaded Database
3) Broken Links6) Host Selection
4) Outdated CMS
5) Invalid HTML and CSS
etc
How to check your website speed?
You must determine your current loading time and check out the reasons that are slowing your site down before starting your website speed optimization. The page loading time recommendation is to be under 3 seconds. So, if you optimize your website speed to an acceptable level, you will get a significant ranking advantage over your competitors.
There are also many performance evaluation tools that a user can try out for checking up their website speed. These tools are fast and free:
1) Page Speed Insights
2) YSlow
3) Load Impact
4) Pingdom Website Speed Test
5) Performance Plugin Profiler (P3)
6) GT Metrix
In order to provide the most optimal, fast user experience to the customers, we recommend 7 key points for enhancing your website speed.
1) Image Size Reduction:
Most of the users like attractive images on the website. Images are a crucial part of the case of large and successful eCommerce websites. More images on the merchandise pages improve engagement. We can say the negative part of the use of images is usually large files that slow down a website.
We can reduce the image size without compressing its quality just by compressing images using tools such as ImageOptim.One more way to reduce image size is to use HTML responsive image attributes.
2) Using a CDN:
A content delivery network or CDN is a system that uses distributed servers to deliver websites and other web content depending on the user’s location, and website’s content. When anyone hosts their website on a single server, all user’s requests are sent to the same hardware as a result of this the time needed to process each request increases. By the use of CDN, user requests are redirected to the nearest server. As a result, the content is delivered to a user quicker and a website works faster.
3) A Better Host:
The server plays an enormous part in the time to first byte and how fast your pages load in general. Hostings can be divided into three different types – Shared, VPS, and Dedicated server.
Shared hosting is one of the most popular types of hosting used by many users worldwide. It is the cheapest way to get your site online within a short period of time. The very important point is choosing a fast web host that ensures better optimization. Though shared hosting is not as fast as compared to VPS and dedicated servers.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) uses multiple servers for content distribution. With VPS one shares their server with their other users and has their own part of the virtual server where the configurations don’t influence other clients. This server is best if your website has average traffic.
A dedicated server is one of the most expensive hosting options which may be one’s physical server. What happens during this case, a user has to pay a server rent and hire a system admin for maintaining it.
4) Website Caching:
Caching is a method for storing information so that it can be later accessed much more quickly. The cached web page doesn’t need to send database requests each time. Website caching depends on the platform in which your website has been developed. If your website has been developed on WordPress you can use the plugin W3 Total Cache. If you are using VPS or a dedicated server, then you can also set up caching under your general settings.
5) 404 Error Detection:
Many times we find on the website “ Page is not found” this is known as 404 Error. The message is provided by the hosting to browsers when they accessed the content of a page no longer exists. You can use error detection tools and plugins for fixing this error. Once the error has been detected you need to assess the traffic that they generate. If these dead links no longer bring any visits and thus never consume your server resource, then you may leave them as they are.
6) Gzip Compression Implementation:
GZIP compression is an effective way that helps to reduce the amount of time it takes to download the HTML, CSS, JavaScript files because they are downloaded as much smaller compressed files, which are then decompressed once they get into the browser. You can enable Gzip on your website by adding some coding.
7) Removal of Unnecessary Plugins:
The use of plugins on the website can be a great way to customize the website and increase its functionality, but using a lot of plugins can really compromise the website’s speed and cause slow loading times. One must have a look at the plugins they are currently having on their website and they can decide which one they absolutely need. The plugins that are not updated may use a lot of large scripts that will result in increased loading time for your website. So the users must check their plugins are up to date.
Blog Conclusion:
Most of the user expects sites to load less than after 3 seconds. But if your website isn’t meeting this expectation, you are definitely going to lose much website traffic and also your revenue. We have to remember the primary point of your website is to enhance traffic and make money. The massive size images and the stylish styles may seem well and good but they might prove harmful if your visitors are waiting more than 10 seconds to access your site.
The importance of website speed cannot be overstated. I believe this article will help you to identify the situations you are facing with your website speeds and how you can overcome them. The speed of your site is a key factor that can make or break the success of your site.
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