4 Simple But Very Effective Steps to Make Your Website Load Faster

Do you know that your site’s load speed can greatly affect your business profits? Maybe you don’t know how much impact website speed has on the success of your business. But then let me tell you what amazon has to say about this.

Recently, Amazon (undeniably the world’s biggest ecommerce brand) revealed that they would lose $1.6 billion a year if their website slowed down.

That’s some incredible statistic, right? But that simply shows the importance of website load speed. Studies upon studies have shown that internet users are very impatient when they visit any website. A high percentage wouldn’t wait more than three seconds for a website to load. This means you could be losing out on thousands of potential visitors every day if your website is slow.

Not only that, but website speed also plays a big part in Google’s algorithm. If your website is sluggish, it may impact your ranking on Google. And of course, this means you would be missing out or more traffic to your business site.

Now, don’t you think it’s time to do something about your site load speed? The good news is, it’s easier than you think to speed things up. Here’s a simple guide you can implement today.

How to Speed Up Your Website

1. Find a Better Web Host and Server

First of all, let’s reveal exactly how load speed works. There are two main aspects at play here. First, your server has to respond to a request. The user clicks on your website, which is essentially asking the server to send over all the information. If this process is slow, then your entire website is going to grind to a halt. So, your first job is making sure it’s fast as lightning. Try upgrading from a cheap web host to a more professional service. They’ll provide you with a faster server. (It will also be more secure against hackers). This is the engine of your website. Make sure it’s fast enough.

2. Regular Monitoring

Now that you’ve set up a faster, more reliable web server, it your job to keep an eye on it. Our advice is to subscribe to a server monitoring service. They’ll measure your response time on a regular basis. If your server appears to slow down or return poor results, you’ll get an email notification. It’s a good indication of how fast your server is at any given time. This back-end of your website is much more important than you think. Sometimes it can be tricky to get your head around, but it’s well worth taking the time.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (or CDN) uses a variety of different servers all over the planet. Let’s say your website is based in New York. If someone accesses the site from Australia, it’s going to take a long time to load. The information has to physically travel across the ocean via cables and satellites. And that takes time. A CDN hosts your information on different servers all over the globe. So when your Australian visitor clicks on your site, it activates a server closest to them. Much faster.

4. Compression and Caching

The second aspect of web speed is all the elements on your website. The images, text, coding etc. The bigger they, the longer they take to load. Simple. With that in mind, compress all the images, and indeed the site itself. It reduces the file size, and makes it much faster to load. Finally, enable caching on your website. It means that people’s browsers (Firefox, Safari etc) will ‘remember’ your site. Instead of requesting all the files again, it has them stored safely. It will quickly reload for your returning visitors.

The above, if carefully implemented, is sure to give your website the speed kick it needs. So, what are you waiting, go give your website some traffic boost!