The page loading speed is one of the most important factors that determine the success of a website. A website’s speed not only affects its search engine optimisation (SEO) but also has a significant impact on its engagement rate, bounce rate, conversion rate and overall user experience.

As users expect a website to load quickly, even a short delay can divert the traffic from a website, increasing bounce rates. Since several businesses try to attract their customers through attractive and comprehensive websites, the loading times can be overlooked.

However, with a few actionable tweaks, you can reduce the page load time of your website and make a positive impact on your audience and potential customers. To assist you in the process, here is a list of top tips that will help you in boosting the loading speed of your website without sacrificing the quality of the content.

• Reduce HTTP requests

According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is utilised by downloading various components of the page such as stylesheets, scripts, images, etc. Every time anyone of these elements is added on a page, a HTTP request is made to download and display it to the end-user.

The more elements, the longer it takes for the page to load.

To reduce the page load time, you need to analyse the number of HTTP requests your website makes. You can further reduce this number of requests by eliminating any unnecessary elements in your webpage or by simplifying its page design. Additionally, you can combine multiple scripts into a single script and improve the response time of your website.

• Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Nowadays, most of the website traffic originates from different mobile devices. It is important for website owners to build a website that is mobile-friendly and can be easily adjusted for smaller screen sizes.

The best way to make your website load faster on a mobile device is by implementing AMP.  Implementation of AMP was introduced by Google to help mobile pages load instantly. It gives mobile users a more streamlined web experience.

With the help of AMP, your web pages will load comparatively faster on all mobile devices and will help in increasing your conversion and bounce rates. Although implementing AMP requires some technical knowledge, there are various plugins available to make the process easier.

• Reduce redirects

Redirects come in handy when you decide to delete or move pages from a website. It is also the best way to remove any issues faced due to broken links. However, having too many redirects can create excess HTTP requests which can have a negative impact on the speed of a website.

While Google suggests to completely exclude redirects from a website, you can still keep them to a minimum to improve your website’s loading speed. To reduce the number of redirects on your website, you can check whether these redirects are helping your website in fulfilling its purpose and gradually eliminate all unwanted redirects. Moreover, you also need to identify and remove any chain of redirects that create multiple unnecessary requests and reduce the load time of your website.

• Enable browser caching

Browser caching is a significant feature that allows the components of a website to be downloaded and stored into a hard drive from a cache or a temporary storage space. By enabling browser caching, you can store a cached version of your website in your visitor’s browser.

Many times when users visit a website, they come in with an empty cache. Once the users visit your website, the different components of your website are downloaded and stored locally on their system. As these components are already downloaded, this helps to increase the subsequent page load speed of a website. This means the next time a user visits your website, the browser will be able to load the page without sending an additional HTTP request to the server. Thus, it will ensure that your website loads much faster.

• Scale down your images

Though images are important in making a website look impressive, they are also one of the most common causes of reducing a website’s speed. To ensure that images do not affect your website’s loading speed, start by optimising your images by scaling them appropriately.

Most website designers try to scale down the images by changing the dimensions of a huge image. However, in this process, only the file size is decreased but the page load time remains the same. Moreover, this might also make the image appear blurry to the audience. An ideal way to scale down an image is by optimising it before uploading. Additionally, you can also compress your images to reduce its size without compromising on the image quality.

• Decrease the number of plugins

Another important component of a website is the plugins. These plugins add specific features in a website that are suggested by third parties. However, when you install numerous plugins, your website will need multiple resources to run them. This might result in decreasing the speed of your website and might also be a cause of several security issues.

To decrease the number of plugins, you can run a performance test on your webpage and find out the plugins that are slowing down the speed of your website. Furthermore, analysing the quality of the plugins is also important as plugins with a vast number of scripts and styles generate numerous database queries.

• Enable database optimisation

Database optimisation is one of the most effective ways to boost the speed of a website. If you use WordPress or any content management system (CMS) that is packed with multiple complex plugins, then your website might work slower due to the large size of the database.

As this database stores a wide range of information such as logs, user data, statistics, comments or blog posts, enabling database optimisation will make your website faster by cleaning up all unwanted information stored in the database.

Conclusion

Increasing the loading speed of a website can be a challenging task. However, once you are able to identify the factors affecting your website’s loading time, you can easily start taking measures to improve the overall performance of your website.

Author bio

Anna Clarke is the owner of the online essay writing service 15 Writers. She is a successful entrepreneur with over 20 years’ experience in freelancing and consulting, specialising in Business, Economics, Finance, Marketing and Management.