One of the biggest reasons that lead to website abandonment and high bounce rates is known to be slow loading websites. If your site takes too long to load, then it’d greatly harm your SEO and eventually harm your online business as you’ll get reduced amount of visibility, web traffic, and poor lead generation and conversion rates. Therefore, you need to make sure that your website is quick to load. So, are you facing trouble with your site speed? Does it take too long to load? Then this article is for you. So, read on and find out how you can reduce loading time of your website.
One of the key concerns when it comes to web development is to have a quick loading website since it plays such an important role in SEO. It is also a big factor determining the UX on your website. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that your website is quick to load. Businesses that let professional digital marketing agencies in Edmonton take care of their marketing, SEO, and web development needs don’t have to worry about such things.
Anyway, let’s get on to our list of…
Ways to reduce loading time of your website
#Run a speed test on your website
First thing, you’d want to know where your website stands in terms of loading speed. So, you should begin with checking the speed of your website as it is currently. For this, there are a number of tools you can use like Pingdom, Page Speed, Web Page Test, etc. that can help you do just that.
#Image optimization
Images can play a significant role in determining the loading speed of your website. Therefore, it is important to optimize them accordingly. To begin with, make sure you use the right file formats for your images. Using the right format can greatly reduce the size of your images. So, make sure you know which format you should use for a certain type image and use it accordingly.
#Don’t scale down large images
Just because you can resize the images on website, doesn’t mean you should use images larger than your required size. If you want to resize an image, do it already using image editors like Photoshop, etc. Doing this will help ensure that as you resize your image, the size of your file also decrease and reduce your website load time.
#Reduce HTTP requests
Most of the website loading time includes the time taken to download images, stylesheets, scripts, other parts of the page. And for each one of these, and HTTP request is made. To reduce the number of HTTP requests made, you can use tool like Google Chrome’s Developer Tools. This will allow you to look through your files and scan for those that are unnecessary. And then, you can work on reducing the number of HTTP requests by starting with your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
#Make your scripts load asynchronously
There are two different ways in which scripts like CSS and JavaScript can be loaded. It can either be synchronous or asynchronous. When your scripts load in the former way, they load one at a time and appear in such an order on the page. On the other hand, when your scripts load in the latter way, some scripts may load simultaneously making your website quicker to load. So, make sure your scripts load asynchronously. And if this technical stuff passes over your head, remember there are always digital agencies in Vancouver that can help you with such stuff.
#Avoid using 301 redirects
The browser is forced to a new redirect every time a 301 redirect is used. This increases the website loading time. Therefore, you should try to avoid using 301 redirects as much as you can.
Final Word
The time that a website takes to load plays a great role in determining its bounce rate. Longer your website takes to load; the higher will be the bounce rate which will eventually ruin your SEO. Therefore, it is crucial to make sure that your website is quick to load. And to do that, the tips given above can come in really handy. But for the best results, you can always sort to the professional services of digital marketing agencies in Mississauga.
For more tips like these, make sure to stay tuned with us!