Google had indicated long back that their search engine bots would consider website speeds while ranking sites. Nevertheless, a slow website is a certain conversion killer as site visitors will quickly bounce away to a faster site.
While you may have optimized your website for ranking and conversions, you may have ignored the need for speed. Unfortunately, potential customers will only wait for a few seconds for each page to load.
Here are a few important ways on how to boost page load speed.
You can begin by scrutinizing your website code to ensure that it is short and streamlined at the same time. A bloated code will slow down your website even though it may work without any problems. Once you have a compact your code in place, you also need to make sure that your images load at the fastest possible rate.
Image files are large in size and can noticeably slow down site loading. You must ensure that you only use appropriate image files such as .jpg, .png, .gif, etc., wherever needed. You also need to optimize your images to make them load faster. High resolution images will result in larger file sizes. Even when you command a high-res file to load with lesser resolutions, it will still require download of the original file before display.
You should additionally ensure that JavaScript and CSS is transferred out of HTML and moved to a single or more documents. This move will ensure a one-time download of JavaScript code and CSS instead of downloading for each page. You must also ensure that CSS is positioned at the top of your code while JavaScript is positioned on the bottom.
Since Include files and CSS can reduce page load times in a noticeable way, you must use this strategy. Anyway, you can also save a lot of time in the future once you develop your website based upon CSS and Include files. Furthermore, you should utilize CSS sprites to combine multiple images so as to turn them into a one image download. This action will allow for faster downloading as well as reduce server strain at the same time.
You must also use page speed optimizing tools such as the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, which provides invaluable information on how to boost page speeds. Finally, you must ensure that your web server is very fast. If your website does not possess sufficient bandwidth, slows down considerably during peak times, or even crashes without warning, then that will create an adverse impression of your website.
If your current web host cannot run at a faster pace or cannot provide a dedicated server as per your needs then you need to seek out another host that can cater to your requirements.
The above tips must be adhered to if you wish to please not only all visitors arriving at your website, but also major search engines such as Google. A fast website will provide fantastic user experience, which in turn will draw in more visitors including those by referrals as well as boost conversions.