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40% of people will abandon your site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds or less.
Adding to that, slow page loading times will negatively affect your site’s SEO, user experience, and the ability to convert site visitors and generate sales.
That said, you should know by now that the faster your website loads for people, the better.
What you may not know, however, is how to optimize your website to load faster.
That’s why we’re here to share with you the top ways to get a blistering fast page loading time so you can drive more traffic, encourage more signups, and generate more revenue than ever before.
So, let’s take a look.
1. Determine a Starting Point
There’s no sense optimizing your website for faster loading times if you don’t know how fast your site is loading right now.
After all, how will you know your improvements are working if you don’t know where you’re starting point is?
Luckily, finding out how fast your site loads is easy when you use Google PageSpeed Insights.
Just enter the domain name of your website and let Google analyze it.
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain name you choose won’t have an impact on your website’s loading speed — however, the DNS server of your domain name provider does.
In fact, according to Matt Janaway of Marketing Labs, “While domain names have no bearing on how fast your site loads, keep in mind the DNS server of your domain name provider does. That’s why it’s important to buy a domain name for your website from a reliable provider that can look up, retrieve, and deliver the right information to your site visitors’ browser when they click on your site.”
When Google analyzes your site’s speed and performance, you’ll receive a speed score for both your desktop and mobile versions, as well as suggestions for improvements.
Once you know how fast your website is loading for site visitors, you can begin to optimize it.
2. Optimize Images
Images are known for taking the longest to load on webpages because their files are usually much larger than any others.
This includes your website’s business logo, blog post images, homepage/landing page imagery, and more.
To prevent a delay in page loading and the frustration of your site visitors that will likely lead to site abandonment, optimize your images by compressing them into smaller files.
To do this, you can use a free online tool like TinyPNG.
When you compress images into smaller file sizes, they take up less space and demand fewer resources from your server to display for site visitors.
3. Minify and Combine Site Files
CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files determine the visual appearance of your website.
In other words, without these files, site visitors would not be able to see your site’s content when they arrive.
However, sometimes these files have unnecessary formatting, whitespace, and code in them that increase the strain placed on your server as they load for people clicking on your site. Source: Web Integrations
Each unnecessary piece of code that your files have adds to the overall size of your webpage.
And the bigger the webpage, the longer it takes to load.
To fix this, you can first eliminate any extra spaces, line breaks, or indentations your website’s code has manually.
For example, the passage below has two extra paragraph breaks that are unnecessary and should be removed. You can do this by deleting them.
In addition, you can use software designed to combine JavaScript and HTML files.
If you use WordPress, there are several helpful plugins such as Autoptimize, Fast Velocity Minify, and Merge + Minify + Refresh.
If you don’t use WordPress or want to minify your site’s files manually, check out a tool like Minifier.
4. Use a CDN
CDNs are a great way to deliver content to site visitors nearly instantly.
Using multiple servers spanning the globe to store your site’s files, a CDN delivers content to people using the server that’s geographically closest to them.
This strategy of using a network of servers reduces latency and improves the user experience.
Your best options for using a CDN include:
- StackPath (previously known as MaxCDN): they only offer full CDN services, meaning they have plenty of data centers across the world to store your site’s content, and their number one goal is to improve loading times.
- Cloudflare: in addition to CDN services, they also offer security and site optimization features.
You might even be able to access CDN services from your web host since many reliable hosting providers give this added feature to their customers for free.
It usually only takes a click here and there in the cPanel or similar of your web host account to activate free (or premium) CDN services.
5. Enable Browser Caching
People that return to your website regularly expect nothing but the best from you.
They want valuable content that teaches and entertains, high-quality products and services at competitive prices, and an exceptional user experience that involves fast loading times.
For instance, let’s say you run a restaurant and you’ve built a business website using a restaurant theme to boost business.
People not only want to be able to access your menu, online ordering form, and reservation section, they want this information at blazing fast speeds.
They don’t have time to wait for your site to load every time they want to make a reservation, order online, or see what food options you have available.
One of the best ways to ensure your website displays quickly for return visitors is to enable browser caching.
When a person comes to your site for the first time, a copy of your site’s files will store in a cache (or temporary storage).
Then, the next time they visit, their browser will display the cached copy immediately.
This eliminates the need for your browser to have to send an HTTP request to your server for a copy of your site’s files every time a repeat site visitors clicks on your website.
If you’re using WordPress, a simple plugin like W3 Total Cache will let you toggle in caching in the backend of your site.
The great thing about using a plugin like W3 Total Cache is that it also offers the following features to help improve site speed and performance:
- Page and object caching
- CDN services
- Minification of site files like CSS, JS, and CSS
It also comes with the option to add a Google PageSpeed Insights widget to your WordPress dashboard so you can always keep track of how fast your site is loading.
If you don’t use WordPress, you might be able to access some built-in caching features from your web host.
Otherwise, it’s likely you’ll have to add some specialized code to your site, which may require the help of an expert.
Final Thoughts
And there you have it! The easiest ways to optimize your website for blazing fast page loading, and why it is should form an important part of your digital marketing strategy.
If you want to scale your site and drive more traffic your way, rank higher in search results, and secure more sales in your online shop, it’s crucial you focus on the user experience.
And because your website’s load speed has a massive impact on your user experience, you need to implement whatever methods you can to drastically improve your page load speed.
That being said, take some time to see how fast your site loads and work on optimizing small parts of your website.
Because when you do, all those small parts will add up and reveal a website that loads well under the 2-second mark.
