Page speed can make a huge difference on the amount of traffic that comes to your website. It is the measurement of the time, the content on your website, takes to load. And it makes sense that visitors do not wait for a long time, for a website to load. If it is taking a lot of time; they simply move on to a competitor’s webpage. Page speed is considered as a very crucial element for web development services that work day and night, to construct a website that loads within no time, on all devices.
It is important to improve website speed if you wish to see your business flourish. But before we disclose some amazing tips that can help you in this context, we will first be discussing the importance of website speed. Why is it so crucial and how it can impact your business positively? Let’s dig into all these details.
Importance of Page Speed
There are different factors that are considered to generate traffic to a website. Remember, that only one thing is not a sole element that can do wonders. Several factors have to work hand in hand, to generate high traffic through offering amazing user experience and wonderful functionality. And one of those many factors is page speed and is actually very important.
It determines the accessibility of the website, its user-friendliness and the amount of traffic it is capable of generating. By enhancing your website’s speed, you are able to gain attention from search engines and boost your optimization as well. This tends to help you rank higher in some of the best search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo etc.
The most essential thing to know here is that your website speed has a chain effect. It has a great influence on the Bounce Rate and the Dwell Time. Moreover, understanding these two terms is very crucial if you want to gain knowledge about how these two further affect your website’s user-friendliness and functionality.
First, Dwell Time is the time a user spends, exploring your website. If you have good quality content, it will help keep the visitors hooked to your website as it will be helpful for them in some way. However, the quality content will go to waste if your page speed is slow. A visitor, eager to find information will not sit waiting for your website to load. Instead, they will simply move to another website. Stats show that visitors only wait for about 8-15 seconds or even less to wait for a website to load. 47% users don’t even wait more than 2-4 seconds. Thus, you can analyze how crucial a well-boosted website page speed is.
Secondly, Bounce Rate is the number of users who leave your website within some seconds, of being redirected towards it. This is directly linked to your website’s speed. Frustration builds up in users fast these days. If your page is taking too long to load, they will simply leave. This has a very negative impact on your ranking, SEO and website traffic.
How to Enhance Website Speed?
Now that you have a clear idea about how important website speed is, it is time to dig into ways you can enhance it. We have summed up the best ways to improve website speed that can help you boost your user-experience, functionality and rank higher too.
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Keep CSS in Header Section:
Many people do not know this; keeping the CSS in the bottom will become a hurdle for your browser to function properly. It will disrupt the entire format and ruin the display too. This will result in poor user experience. Thus, do check your CSS. If it is in the bottom, keep it in the header section.
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Move JavaScript to the Bottom:
Make sure that JavaScript is not in the header section. If it is, move it out of there and place it, at the bottom of the page. It is supposed to be placed before the </body> tag. Why is this important? If JavaScript is not placed right, it will block the rendering of the page. This is the major reason why the page remains blank for the first few seconds. Thus, make sure that the JavaScript is placed at the bottom.
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Optimize the Images:
A professionally SEO optimized website design, pays attention to image optimization as well. Amongst a bunch of factors that can boost your website speed, image optimization is one of the top most ones. It is recommended that the image size remains below 100kb as high resolution images take a long time to load and process. Softrick provides optimized websites which includes image optimization as well.
JPEG is the best format for images and it is easily compressed too. This format works best for larger images. On the other hand, if you want to add smaller images to your website, PNG is a great format. These are used in categories or menu for food websites. If you are planning to add animated images, GIF is the best format to use. However, it is best to use GIFs while you are using small images.
Another factor to pay attention to is the size of the image. Resizing your images, according to the width of your website is the best way to optimize your images. It is recommended that you resize your images below 2000px. However, don’t compromise too much on quality whilst doing the resizing. Make sure that you consider everything hand in hand. If you downsize the image below 2000px, it will appear in extremely poor quality.
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Concentrate CSS and JS Files:
If you concentrate all the JS and CSS files, your website will use less bandwidth. Moreover, few files directly means few requests too. This helps in great rendering of the page and boosts the user experience really well too.
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CDN Utilization:
The best web development services USA, utilize CDN to improve website speed. How? CDN helps in reducing HTTP request and thus results in enhancing the page speed amazingly. CDN stands for Content Delivery Networks that have optimized serves throughout the world, for instance Cloud Front. This network helps in loading the website’s content, that is, CSS, JavaScript and images faster.
Another important factor to consider for using CDN, is that it permit larger files HTTP requests to be sent, one by one, rather than in one go. This plays a huge role in improving the website’s speed. Thus, using CDN is one of the most efficient ways to enhance user experience in terms of page loading speed.
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Enables Browser Caching:
It is extremely important to cache the browser for a good website speed. Why? When a visitor arrives at your website, the elements of your webpage, like CSS and JavaScript etc. get saved in the hard drive of the user’s cache. Now, whenever that same visitor comes back to your website, an HTTP request will not be sent, enhancing the website’s loading speed impeccably well. Therefore, enabling browser caching can have a huge positive impact on your overall user experience.
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Minimize the Redirects:
If you use redirects in the code, your website will automatically load slower. Redirects impact your website negatively and hurt the user experience. This gets even worse for people who are loading your website through their mobile. Therefore, minimizing redirects will do a lot well to your overall website speed and user experience.
CONCLUSION:
Your website speed is the deal maker or breaker of your business. The more time your website takes to load, the higher the chances get that your visitor will head towards your competitor. If you want to boost your website’s sure experience and functionality, then working on its speed is very important. Do not overlook the essentiality of this speed as it can help you generate traffic to your website really well. We highly recommend Softrick Solutions as they can help you in enhancing website’s speed too. We hope that these simple tips can do you good. Thus, utilize them and get the best out of them to enhance your website’s loading speed. Make sure that it pops up within 4-5 seconds, so that the visitors don’t start getting second thoughts about your business.