Having a highly-functioning website is excellent. It creates an online presence, which is essential to your company’s success. It helps you build a recognizable brand and motivates customers to buy your products and services.
But, is it enough to optimize the look and functionality of your website only?
The answer is no.
In 2018, Google announced that desktop and mobile load times would be factors in its rankings. It means any reduction in your website loading speed could benefit its ranking. The good news is you can speed up your site’s load time without investing thousands of dollars into your marketing strategy, or waiting a long time for the benefits to materialize.
So, in this guide, we’ll provide you with 13 quick tips to improve your website loading speed in 2023. Read on to find out more!
13 Quick Tips to Improve Website Loading Speed in 2023
1. Run a speed check first
First and foremost, you should diagnose your speed to determine whether it’s working well or suffering from major speed issues. Several free online services offer reliable performance reports, such as:
- Google Pagespeed Insights
- Performance Budget Calculator
- Pingdom
- YSlow
You can run free tests on different services and estimate your page speed by taking the average of the results. If the average number is faster than 1.5 seconds, your website is already doing well, but you can improve further. You may need significant improvements if your website needs more than 2.5 seconds to load.
2. Choose a trustworthy hosting solution
The hosting provider you choose is essential to your website’s performance and management, including page speeds.
One of the worst mistakes is settling for cheap hosting for a lower monthly rate. Remember that cheap hosting often means poor performance. It can share your resources between various websites on an overloaded server, ending up straining page loading times.
When looking at hosting, you have three common options:
- Shared hosting – This option is the cheapest, and you can get it for several dollars per month. While you can use it for low-traffic websites, you’ll find it hard to keep up with traffic spikes and high-volume websites. As its name suggests, you share specific resources like disk space, CPU, and RAM with other websites hosted on the same server.
- VPS hosting – You still share a server with other websites, but you have your dedicated portions of the server’s resources. VPS hosting is a good in-between option.
- Dedicated server – Dedicated hosting is much like owning a home. You don’t share resources with other websites, but you have more work to do with technical setup and configuration.
If you realize that your traffic levels are slowing down the server response times, it may be time to switch to a VPS from shared hosting, or a dedicated server from a VPS.
3. Leverage a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN takes your website’s data and delivers its copies across different locations worldwide. It means by using a CDN, you make it more likely that foreign visitors can access your site at a fast speed. Otherwise, people who live far away from your servers might endure slow load speeds.
You have various options to choose a CDN, including picking a host that provides a CDN so you can enable it directly from your dashboard.
4. Optimize the website for mobile
Mobile devices are eating the world. So, it’s more than crucial that your website is mobile-friendly and optimized for smaller screen sizes, such as Google Pixel 5 or iPhone 12.
A few tips below can help optimize your website for mobile:
- Consider switching to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Opt for a responsive website design
- Reduce JavaScript execution time
- Monitor mobile-friendliness regularly on Google Search Console
Developers often write and test websites on desktop devices and optimize them for mobile devices later. But it can be a painful process.
Some experts suggest you write mobile-first code, and the experience would be optimized for mobile devices by default. Then, adjusting your website for desktop devices would be a more straightforward process.
Optimizing your E-commerce site for a smooth mobile experience isn’t difficult, but you still need the technical knowledge. It’s better to hire an experienced and dedicated developer to meet your specific needs.
There are many developers out there, but you should work with developers from a trustworthy agency to reduce the hiring time and costs. Mageplaza is a good solution for you. From optimizing desktop and mobile versions to offering free support, there are many benefits when hiring developers from Mageplaza.
5. Enable browser caching
Your website will load faster if the visitor’s browser “remembers” the resources and data it requires. You can significantly cut back on page speed times by enabling browser caching, which stores some of your site’s data on the viewer’s end.
Enabling browser caching depends on the platform your site is developed on. For example, you can use plugins like W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache for WordPress.
Using VPS or dedicated hosting, you can set up scratching under general settings. Website caching isn’t often available for shared hosting. That’s why we said that you should choose a web host carefully.
6. Implement Gzip compression
Gzip compression is an efficient way to reduce the size of files on your site, and it compresses files before sending them to your browser. Then, these files automatically unzip for visitors so they can see your website as it should appear.
You can enable Gzip compression by adding code lines or using available apps.
7. Reduce the number of redirects
If a link is entered incorrectly or broken, your server can redirect visitors to another page to ensure they stay on your website. But using too many redirects can create additional HTTP requests, impacting speed negatively, especially on mobile devices.
Of course, redirects may be necessary in some cases, such as when moving to a new domain. However, reducing unnecessary redirects can lower page loading times on your site.
You can identify redirects and broken links using tools like Screaming Frog. Once you’ve identified them, check whether they serve an essential purpose. If not, you should get rid of them as soon as possible.
8. Reduce 404 errors
404 errors happen when a page no longer exists, so the server cannot find it. Your server will show this error after searching your website, which can slow it down.
You can find 404 errors using error detection plugins or tools. After that, you need to evaluate the traffic that they generate. If they no longer bring any visits, you may repair or delete them. If they still have some traffic coming, consider fixing the link addresses for the internal ones and setting redirects for external links.
9. Cut back on the use of web fonts
Web fonts can be incredibly eye-catching and promote your brand continuity. Unfortunately, they can take a long time to render, which dramatically slows your site down.
The below best practices will help you reduce the size of web fonts:
- Use modern formats, like WOFF2, for modern browsers
- Include character sets in the site design only
- Only choose the needed styles
10. Optimize your images
Images play an essential part in E-commerce websites. Using product images and graphics on your website can improve engagement a lot. However, the negative side of this use is images are often large files that slow down your website.
So, what should you do to optimize your images? Follow the tips right below:
- Compression – Ensure to compress images before uploading them. Try to reduce their size without sacrificing quality.
- Use lazy-load images – The idea of lazy loading is to load images only when visitors need to display them. It means your website will only show images above the fold, and the rest will appear as soon as visitors scroll the page. You can use some plugins like Native LazyLoad.
- Use the right formats – As a rule of thumb, JPEGs are better for photos, while PNGs are better for graphic images. WebP is also gaining popularity, but be aware that some browsers like Internet Explorer and older versions of Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge don’t support it.
Want to find a solution to compress and optimize your images, without sacrificing their quality? You should try Image Optimizer – an extension that automatically optimizes your images to speed up your loading page, enhance user experience, and boost conversion rates significantly.
11. Remove unnecessary plugins
Plugins can make your site more accessible and exciting for visitors, but they also make it load slower. Thus, you need to find a happy medium.
First, check which plugins are installed on your site. If you don’t use specific ones anymore, uninstall them. Then, you can run another performance test to see which plugins still slow your website down. While some are necessary, you can keep them up-to-date to improve the loading speed.
12. Minimize the number of CSS and JavaScript files
CSS and JavaScript files will generate various HTTP requests for your server, so you should monitor how many of these files you’re using. Grouping them will reduce the number of requests your server has to deal with in one goal.
Try tools like Grunt, WillPeavy, and Script Minifier to do this process easily.
13. Minimize external scripts
External scripts are embedded in your site through a third-party code, like an embedded Youtube video or chatbot. Depending on the script size, they can slow your webpage down or cause webpages to not load all at once. Consider eliminating them if they’re unnecessary on your website.
Conclusion
Speed matters a lot when it comes to running a website. If you want to see your site rank for highly competitive keywords, you shouldn’t ignore this factor.
By following the 13 tips above, you can trim your site’s weight down to a controllable level while improving customer experience. Any other tips you want us to add to this guide? Please let us know in the comment section right below!
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