5 Ways to Increase Your Web Page Speed
In our post-modern world with its hectic pace and frenetic lifestyle, owning an income-generating website where the pages load slowly is going to cost you visitors to your site. People will just click away from your site after a few seconds and end up on your competitor’s site.
According to the experts, a one-second delay in the load time of a webpage yields the following:
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11% fewer page views
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16% decrease in customer satisfaction
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7% loss in conversions (source: Aberdeen Group)
Can you imagine the result if your web page takes longer than one second to load? Worst case: you might as well close your business as you will not be able to make enough sales in order to cover your costs, never mind make a profit.
Therefore the question that you should be asking is how do you decrease the load time of your website? Here are 5 tips to help you increase your page speed:
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Optimize images on your web page.
Customers love highly visual, high-density images, especially when browsing around your eCommerce store. The challenge is that a brightly colored, highly visual image has to be a highly pixelated image which takes a long time to load, especially on slower internet connections. The answer here is to remove image comments, reduce the color depth to the lowest acceptable level, and crop your image to fit your page size.
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Optimize your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
It’s easy to leave extra, unused code on your CSS pages, resulting in your webpages taking longer to load as your web browser has to read all the extra code. If you feel you might need the extra code one day, make backup copies of all your CS sheets and take all the extra code out of the sheets that are live on your website. The other route you can follow is to take out all the CSS code in your website’s HTML code and put all the CSS code in an external stylesheet; thereby helping to reduce the load time of your web pages considerably.
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Reduce the number of plugins you have on your website.
Website builders will sometimes install lots of plugins onto your website, in order to experiment with which plugin will help them design the best website for you. Once again, it is easy to leave all the extra plugins installed on your site because they are allegedly sitting in the background and will do no harm. This is obviously not true so when you take delivery of your website, ensure that all the extra, unused plugins are uninstalled from the back end of your website.
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Reduce your web server’s response time
Your web server’s response time should be less than 200 milliseconds. The best way to reach this target is to reduce the size of your website by following the tips in this article.
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Enable browser caching
Browser caching is nifty trick which allows the elements of the web page you are visiting to be stored in a temporary storage of sorts on your computer’s hard disk drive. The next time you visit the same web page, it will load faster as it is stored in your web browser’s web cache.
Final Thoughts
Decreasing your website’s load speed might not be easy; however, it is worth the time and money spent on achieving the lowest load times you possibly can. This will increase web traffic to your website and, ultimately, increasing the number of sales you make via your website.