Important Tips To Speed Up Your Website
As you know, customers’ purchasing decisions are highly impacted by slow loading speeds. A slow loading website leads to various risks towards customer retention, brand reputation, SEO, conversion rate, and so much more. This shows how important it has become to have a fast-loading website with a strong domain and web hosting in today’s fast-paced digital world.
To beat this speed threat, let’s understand some important tips for speeding up your website. Businesses that aim for high-performing websites can use these tips and leverage reliable NZ web hosting for optimal website speed and performance.
Important Tips to Improve Website Speed
1. Regular Speed Audit
Before directly taking action to boost your website speed, you need to understand where your website stands in terms of speed. So, start by conducting a full audit, which will give you an understanding of performance and bottlenecks in terms of speed. You can use audit tools like Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insight, and GTmetrix to understand this.
These tools will give you clear insights into how fast your website loads and what is affecting the speed. It is best to check website speed using various devices like desktop and mobile, as their performance may vary on each device.
2. Browser Caching
Browser caching allows your audience to store certain frequently accessed resources locally on their devices. When you set up a cache-control header, it instructs the browser to store these resources.
This may include JavaScript, CSS, and images, so your users don’t need to download them every time they access your website. This ultimately improves website speed and performance.
3. Code Compression
You must have heard that a browser reads every line of your website code before displaying your webpage to your audience. Thus, poor coding practices can slow down your website significantly, which will negatively affect your website speed.
In such a scenario, it is best to minify your HTML, CSS, and Javascript and enable Gzip compression. Minifying will help remove unnecessary elements like white space, unused code and comments and combine several CSS and JS files into one to lessen the number of downloads. Further, Gzip compression will make HTML, JS and CSS files smaller for quick download and it ensures all file sizes are reduced to 70%.
4. Always Go for Reliable Web Hosting Provider
When you purchase web hosting from a reliable provider, you are assured that you get an optimised server. Whether you buy any web hosting package, your web hosting providers will ensure they optimise their web hosting plans and servers to their best website speed.
5. Reduce Down HTTPS Request
HTTPS request is your browser’s way to find different elements of your website. This includes image stylesheet scripts for your website. When your website has too many of these elements that are not well-optimised, it will generate multiple HTTP requests.
When your browser has too many HTTO/1.1 requests, it can slow down your website loading as several parallel requests will be generated, causing delays. To control your speed, start by removing unnecessary elements from your website.
Conclusion
Start your speed optimisation journey by searching how to test my website speed. Testing your current website speed will give you an idea of where you stand in the whole speed optimisation journey.
Remember, the speed optimisation process is not a one-time thing; rather, it is a continuing process that requires time and effort. So, make use of the above tips to improve your website speed and move towards a faster, more efficient website.