HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR WEBSITE
Let’s be honest. How do you feel when you order food, and it’s brought after a long wait? Or when there is a long line behind the checkout in a supermarket?
I know. You don’t like the wait. Guess what, your Website visitors don’t like it either.
What’s worse is that your visitors will leave and most likely never come back.
A survey done by Kissmetrics showed that 79% of the participants reported that they wouldn’t return to a slow-loading website.
Why Is It Important To Have A Fast Loading Website?
Customers expect it. Good answer, but that’s not all.
A fast loading website leads to a better customer experience, which results in higher conversions. Below are some of the reasons why you should make sure your Website loads fast:
- Google is now using page speed as a ranking factor in their search results pages (SERPs)
- 53% of mobile Website visits leave web pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load
- A research done by hosting tribunal stated that at least 64% of online shoppers never go back to a website that gave them a bad experience. 43% of customers unsatisfied with your Website’s loading speed will do their shopping at a competitor’s Website.
What Is An Ideal Website Loading Time?
In July 2018, Google announced it was switching to Mobile Index First, which could use a website loading time as a ranking factor in its Google SERPs. Since then, there has been a lot of focus on how to optimize website loading times on mobile devices.
Doubleclick, a company owned by Google, published a report in September 2016 that showed the average load time for mobile websites accessed over 3G connections to be 19 seconds. It also reported that 53% of all mobile sites get abandoned when their homepage takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Photo Credits: MOZ
Ways to Speed up Your Website
There are many ways you can use to speed up your Website. I have compiled a list of the most effective ways you can deploy to speed up your Website.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Hosting your content files on a content delivery network (CDN) is among the most effective ways of speeding up your Website loading time. It has been reported that you can save up to 60% of your bandwidth and reduce the number of requests from your Website by 50%.
What Is CDN, and how does it Work?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of web servers across multiple locations geared towards delivering content more efficiently to users.
A CDN works by displaying your search results based on your proximity of the web server with that content closest to you .i.e. the server with the quickest response time.
Some of the platforms available that offer this functionality include Amazon CloudFront and MAXCDN.
- Get Rid Of Unnecessary Plugins
Unnecessary plugins and add-ons on your Website do indeed negatively affect your Website by increasing its loading speed.
Start blogging online is a website that reduced its Website’s loading speed from 4.23 seconds to 1.33 seconds after evaluating and implementing plugin changes on its Website. They found out that plugins were the ones that had contributed to at least 86% of their Website load speeds.
It’s good also to note that it isn’t just the number of plugins you have installed on your Website but their quality matters as well .i.e. a website with 50 plugins could load faster than one with 10 plugins if those 10 plugins load a lot of scripts that perform a lot of remote requests.
Photo Credits: WordPress.org
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) is a plugin that scans all your WordPress plugins for performance issues and provides you with a report that shows you how each plugin affects your website performance.
- Reduce Server Response Time
Server response time is the duration it takes for a client’s request .i.e. search results from a browser and a server responding to that request. It is measured by TTFB (Time to First Byte). TTFB is measured in milliseconds and represents how many milliseconds it takes the first byte of a webpage after an HTTP request has been sent.
Photo Credits: Pixabay
Why Is Server Response Time Important?
A slow website affects user experience, which results in damaging your business.
Therefore, knowing your server response time enables you to set up strategies of how to improve the user experience with your Website.
User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are among the main factors that influence a server response time.
- Choose a Fast Webhost
Most people, when starting, usually go for the cheapest hosting option for their Website. However, as their marketing efforts become effective, web traffic on their Website starts increasing, and this presents a need for them to upgrade to a faster web hosting plan to avoid performance issues with your visitors.
HostGator comes highly recommended with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and a bunch of customer care representatives on standby 24/7 ready to assist you when stuck.
Photo Credits: HostGator
- Optimize and Compress Images
A website with images that have large file size slows down its loading speed.
If your Website is hosted on WordPress, install the WP Smush.it plugin. This is a handy plugin that automatically compresses your images without losing any visual quality.
What’s great about the WP Smush.It plugin is that it works in the background, each time you upload your image, hence it doesn’t affect your website performance. You can also choose to run it automatically on all your images uploaded on your media library.
- Reduce Redirects
Redirects are sometimes necessary, but too many of them can slow down your website loading speed. Make it a rule that only one redirect should be used for a page.
It’s also a good idea to avoid purchasing additional URLs that are variations of your name and focus keywords that direct users to your Website. This is because it has been known to slow things down and even sometimes confuse your visitors.
- Use Caching Plugin
Caching is the process of storing data in a temporary storage area.
A Caching plugin does this by generating static HTML pages of your Website and saves them on your web server.
What happens is that each time a user accesses your Website, the caching plugin brings up your saved HTML pages instead of the heavier and time-consuming web pages.
WP Total Cache and WP Super Cache are two of the most popular and effective caching plugins available for WordPress. Want to know the best part? These plugins are available for FREE. A caching plugin is a must-have component for your Website.
- Use Optimized WordPress Themes
Many web designers still use flush and include bells and whistles on their client’s websites. This negatively affects the loading speeds of the websites.
An optimized WordPress theme is built with SEO and content optimization in mind. Therefore, having an optimized WordPress theme is extremely important.
- Minify Javascript and CSS Files
Here’s the thing. WordPress, being the most widely used content management system (CMS), does have a couple of setbacks. One of them being: each time you add a new plugin, a new JS or CSS file is added virtually to your Website.
These new JS and CSS files can cause your Website to become sluggish and load slowly.
Here are two ways you can minify your files to increase their loading speeds.
The first one involves integrating all your files into one. Therefore, instead of calling up 15 individual Javascript or CSS files, you simply just call up that one file.
The second strategy is deleting whitespaces, which in turn causes your file size to shrink. If you’re using WordPress, WP Minify is one great plugin that gets the job for you, and the best part is that it does it automatically.
- Reduce External HTTP Requests
An HTTP request is a packet or segment of information that a computer sends to another computer with a request to perform a task. The sending computer is the ‘client’ while the receiving computer is a ‘server.’
HTTP requests are made for a wide range of elements such as; images, scripts, style sheets, and the more requests made, the longer it takes for a web page to load.
Yahoo did a research and found out that over 80% of a web page’s load time is spent downloading these elements.
- How Do You Minimize These Requests?
The first step is figuring out the number of requests your Website makes and decide which elements need to be removed. Use Google Chrome and click on the ‘Developer tools’ to see how many HTTP requests your Website makes.
- Clean Up Your Database
WordPress does collect a lot of data along its way, and these can sometimes clog your Website and slow it down. These include saved drafts, deactivated plugins, post revisions, etc.
WP-Optimize is an awesome plugin that you can install and set to delete unwanted stuff periodically routinely.
- Compress Gzip
Gzip (GNU zip) is a free and open-source algorithm used for file compression. It is used in the compression of files – minus images, in as much as 70% to save storage space or increase the data transfer rates, which includes speeding up website loading times.
There are only 4 ways you can implement Gzip compression on your site, and they include:
(A) Adding a Code to Your Website [.htaccess file]
# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
(B) Compress Certain File Types by Extension
<files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>
(C) Add The Following Code To The Top Of Your HTML Or PHP Page:
<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER[‘HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING’], ‘gzip’)) ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”); else ob_start(); ?> (D) Install a Gzip Compression Plugin
W3 Total Cache tool is a plugin for WordPress websites, which will automatically compress your Website content for faster loading.
- Block Hotlinking of Images
Hotlinking refers to the practice of linking directly to website elements such as images or videos to minimize resource utilization on your part. It is stealing someone’s bandwidth to your benefit. Definitely, not good.
Let Me Illustrate:
Let’s say the owner of website A sees a particular image hosted on Website B and decides they want it featured on their Website as well. Now, instead of Website A owner downloading the image and hosting it on his server, they choose instead to link directly to Website B’s domain.
Photo Credits: KeyCDN
How to Avoid Hotlinking
After my above illustration, it is understandable that you’re anxious to know how you can prevent someone from hotlinking to your website images or videos.
Here are a couple of solutions you can use.
- Hotlink Protection with A CDN
Several CDNs provide hotlink protection to their users within their product offerings, such as KeyCDN, through its feature known as ZoneReferrers. This feature allows users to restrict HTTP referrers, and it’s a foolproof method of ensuring that there aren’t any website owners taking advantage of your Website bandwidth, which could result in you paying higher hosting charges without your knowledge.
- WordPress Plugin
There is an All in One WP Security and Firewall plugin that allows you to disable hotlinking – preventing people from hotlinking to images or videos hosted on your Website.
- Add the following code to your .htaccess file [Check no. 13]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
[Just don’t forget to replace to yourdomain.com with your actual domain name]
- Use the Latest PHP Version
According to a survey done by W3techs, approximately 81.8% of websites that use server-side programming language use PHP.
Websites still using earlier versions of PHP experience slow website loading speeds, and hence the importance of keeping the PHP versions up to date.
PHP code execution time decreases by over 20% when you upgrade to PHP 5.5, that’s according to Pantheon. PHP 7 offers a boost of over 200% faster PHP code execution time and at least a 50% lower memory consumption.
However, before upgrading to PHP 7.0, it will be a good idea to check if your Website and plugins will be compatible with it. You can use WPEngine to scans your plugins and themes for compatibilities issues with PHP 7.0 or a command-line tool – PHP 7cc.
- Embed Videos Rather Than Uploading Directly On WordPress
Video enriches your content and increases the likelihood of your visitors engaging with your Website, resulting in higher conversions and sales.
There are two main ways of having video on your Website: embedding and uploading.
Embedding and Uploading Videos explained.
Embedding refers to the integration or links of images, videos, or any other media into your social media posts or even websites. Uploading or hosting is the storing of media files; videos, images, etc. on your Website.
It is strongly recommended that you always embed media files as opposed to uploading them to your Website. This is why:
- Easy Sharing
You can easily share a video on YouTube or any video sharing platform by just copying and pasting the URL of that video into your blog posts.
- More Bandwidth, More Charges
Uploading videos to your Website increases your bandwidth, which results in increased charges from your web hosting service provider.
- More Visibility and Traffic
YouTube is currently ranked the second most used search engine and third most visited Website in the world. What this means to you is that uploading your videos on YouTube will bring you more viewers as opposed to uploading it on your Website.
Here is a step by step process of how to easily embed content into your blog post.
- Get Rid Of Broken Links
How could you feel when upon clicking a link on a website, you suddenly land on a 404 error page? Definitely, not good.
Broken links not only drain your bandwidth, but they are among the things that can make people leave your Website. Fixing broken links can dramatically increase your website performance and reduce bounce rates.
I recommend using the 3 tools below. This is because one tool may be able to identify some broken links in an area, and not in others. While others can do the same in other areas, this means that none of the tools is perfect if used individually, but they are extremely effective when used as a package.
- Google Webmaster Tools (Crawl errors tab)
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Ahrefs
- Divide Long Posts into Multiple Pages
It is a widely accepted rule that the more detailed a blog post is, the higher its chances of ranking well on Google SERPs. There is a bit of truth in that. However, it is also true that long-form blog posts with lots of images do more harm than good, as they negatively affect a website’s loading speed.
Fortunately, there is a way you can go about this.
Split your blog posts into smaller, multiple web pages, which will load faster.
Final Thoughts
Slow-loading websites are a liability to themselves. They hurt conversions, which results in the inability of the website owner to earn from them. Fortunately, as we have seen, there are many ways and strategies you can implement, to revise the tide.
Follow the strategies I have laid down for you and be assured of having a website that not only loads fasters but converts well.