How long your website takes to load plays a great role in determining its UX. It also then apparently plays a big role in determining your website’s bounce rate—that is how many people exit your website without engaging with it. And this further influences the success of your SEO. Therefore, a business needs to have a fast loading website. Not sure how to do it? Then this article can come in really handy for you. So, read on and learn about some of the best tips that can help improve loading speed of your website.
One of the key factors that lead to site abandonment and higher bounce rates is the loading speed of a website. This explains why digital marketing agencies in New York put so much focus on improving the site speed of their clients.
So, with the importance of having a fast loading website established, let’s talk about how you can improve it.
Improve loading speed of your website with these tips
#Keep testing the speed of your website
It’d be a good practice to keep testing the speed of your website every once in a while. This will help you ensure that your website keeps a fast loading speed. There are a number of tools that you can use for the same like PageSpeed, Pingdom, Web Page Test, etc.
#Compress script files
Your script files from CSS, HTML, and JavaScript add to the load time of your website. Therefore, compressing the size of such files can be very useful in improving the speed of your website. For this, you can use software applications like Gzip that allows webmasters to compress script files like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, and helps reduce it size. This in turn reduces the loading time.
#Optimize your code
By minifying your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, you can greatly improve the loading speed of your website. To optimize your code, you can do a number of things like remove unnecessary spaces, commas, characters from the code, getting rid of code comments, formatting, unused codes, and so on. This can bring a dramatic change in your website speed.
#Image Optimization
Images are an essential part of a website. It helps make the website engaging and explain its content better. Therefore, images are essential for a great user experience. However, if not optimized properly, it can also ruin the user experience by putting slowing down the speed of website loading. As a result, there’d be increased website abandonment which will further higher up your bounce rates and harm dwell time. This explains why professionals at digital marketing agency in Dallas put so much emphasis on image optimization. So, make sure that the images on your website are optimized and use the right file formats.
#Resize images in editors, not on website
Many people resize their images from bigger to smaller dimensions on the website itself (like when they are updating a blog). However, you should avoid such a practice because resizing an image on website doesn’t really make any difference in its file size and does add a burden on loading. Hence, it is always best advised to resize your images using photo editors like Photoshop, etc.
#Avoid 301 Redirects
Whenever a 301 redirect is used on a website, the browser is forced to a new URL. This adds to the loading time of your website thus making it open slowly. Therefore, it is best advised that you avoid using 301 Redirects and look for an alternative instead.
#Minimize HTTP requests
A great percentage of website loading time includes downloading of images, stylesheets, scripts, and other parts of the page. And since an HTTP request is made for each of these, trying to minimize such requests can help speed up the website loading. For this, you can use Google Chrome’s Developer Tools and find out unnecessary files.
#Go for asynchronous loading
Scripts like CSS and JavaScript can either be loaded synchronously or asynchronously. The advantage of making them load asynchronously is that it will allow many scripts to load simultaneously while synchronous loading makes them load one by one. Thus, with asynchronous loading, you will be able to make your website load faster
Final Word
The loading speed of your website plays a great role in determining how, and whether or not your visitors and potential customers engage with your. If your website load time is more than 3 seconds, there is an increased risk of site abandonment—which will eventually lead to higher bounce rates, poor dwell times, and failing of marketing campaign. This explains why professional digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles put so much emphasis on high website loading speed. And so, with the help of the tips given above, you can effectively improve your website’s loading speed.
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