“Give visitors what they want, and give it fast.”
The average response time of any professional website shouldn’t be above 3.5 seconds. It showcases the human susceptibility of losing patience in the 21st century after a certain period. Being fast now is more important than it ever was. Let put it this way that your website speed must be in par with the improving technology for perfect user experience.
Nobody likes to use a laggy website or one that takes ages to load. If you are a business owner of any kind, you wouldn’t certainly want your website to be slow. Most Website making companies or even renowned website builders really don’t do much for speed as for the visual essence. So what can you do for a better run speed of your business website? Here, we present you with eight easy ways to achieve a better website speed in 2020: –
1. Improve your Hosting Plan
Yes!!! As simple as that. Most of the business websites get a bit stingy or careless in hosting after spending all that money on a beautiful website. You can get anywhere between 100 and 30000 $ (USD) per Year hosting Packages out there. Shared hosting might be better for startups but you will soon realize that as your site grows in usage and content, they get slower. Just find a better plan for the website which can support the volume and quality of your web outlet.
2. Implement your own CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN basically ensures visitors around different countries/parts of the world have a more accessible and fast experience of loading your website. How does it work? Well, a collection of global servers that share website static files (CSS or JavaScript) deliver from the server closest to the user’s location (Physical). Simply to understand, if a user clicks to play a video on your website, the file loads and plays faster because it is distributed from the nearby server.
3. Use of Adaptive Images
HTTP Archive’s study has shown that in most websites above 60% of its page weight is images. Using different tools like Picture fill or Adaptive Images helps to save the bandwidth resulting in the improvement of page speed for the site. Another way might be the use of new/modern image formats like WebP or Jpeg XR which can help to reduce image weight by 25-40% without necessarily sacrificing the image quality. The use of adaptive images might be a gamechanger in making your professional website faster.
4. Evaluate your website Plugins
Plugins on the surface bring new features and functionality to your website. But stacking plugins might take your website to load slower. Poorly developed or outdated plugins might dramatically affect the speed of your website. Remove plugins duplicating the functionality of the existing one or which is no longer in use for better performance.
5. Compress your content
It’s basic math that it takes less amount of time to download smaller files. And how to achieve it? Compression is the key. Popular web servers (Apache and IIS) use the GZIP compression algorithm, which does its job automatically on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It can be impressive in removing the unnecessary characters and spaces across your HTML and CSS code. So compress to the extent you can go without a drastic drop in the quality of your professional website content.
6. Cut down External Scripts
The snippets of JavaScript code that you’ll include for adding an extra feature or library like many other external scripts make Http request and that too every time a new page load. External Scripts like “Like my page” Facebook boxes, External commenting systems (Like Disqus), Pop-up Boxes, Website analytics add-ons, and even External Fonts could be slowing your sites. We are not suggesting you cut off these all but you can certainly improve or avoid especially large scripts that take longest to load.
7. Take Advantage of Caching
The caching feature simply allows the visitor’s browser to collect different strategic copies of your site’s pages in their device. As a result, the content can be called upon from the browser’s saved cache when the visitor returns rather than loading the complete site from scratch. So, by storing cache versions of different static resources by browser, your website loading process can be tremendously faster.
8. Eliminate the Extra/Useless baggage
Extra baggage here indicates stale content, unused plugins, unnecessary external scripts, and more. Massive database, mostly in case of eCommerce-websites, update it to hold the important ones and reduce the outdated ones. Too many backups at the server level also qualify as baggage here. For WordPress users, the older installations of WordPress might act as a piece of baggage.
Significance of a fast professional website
* It is the first impression of your Digital Presence and can impact your client’s preference notably.
* Google expects speed. It is better for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the health of the Website.
* The User Experience is everything, it is one of the very few things assisting to set your professional website above the competition.
* Slow websites just kill conversion (About 40% people abandon websites taking over 3 seconds to load and even more when the load time increases.)
* Revisitors to your website decrease due to their prior lagging experience of a slow website.
* For a business website speed is everything as you must respect the time of possible clients to your website.