How Do I Improve My Website Page Speed?

Good user interface plays an important role in enhancing user experience which leads to the user revisiting your website. For a good user interface, website speed performance plays a critical role and good speed also encourages better Google ranking. Google analyzes the bounce rate that is dependent on a website’s load speed, and thus poorly rates any website that takes time to load. This means fewer page views and low conversions.

Surveys show that almost half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. Most of them surf the web on mobile phones and tablets and expect high-speed response times. Losing even a fraction of a second can negatively impact your Audience Engagement and Google Indexing Ratio. There are a few ways to ensure that your website’s performance isn’t compromising.

• Scale and format your images properly –Focus on the size and format of your images. Resize your pictures to match your page’s size in pixels. Incorrect placement of different-sized images to different-sized locations creates a bad user experience as it delays page load. JPEG is your best formatting option for visuals.
• Cache – Effective cache setup is vital to providing content to visitors in a timely manner. Browser cache stores and retrieves things already downloaded in a place on your hard disk. Server-side caching is the act of storing and recovering data on the server. Both techniques allow for more website responsiveness.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) – A CDN minimizes the distance between visitors and your website’s server. It hosts static content like images, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and increases web speed by decreasing latency.
• Enable compression – Bulky pages are slow to load. You can reduce their load time by using G-Zip, a technique used for compression. It compresses the page’s files, searches, images, JS Files, HTML codes and allows the page to load quickly even with slow internet connections.
• Bandwidth capacity – Like cars on the freeway, data on your website can become congested. Fast servers hosting with better bandwidth to prevent an increasing number of users from slowing down your site’s receptivity.
• Prioritize above-the-fold CSS content – Improve your website’s efficiency by having your above-the-fold (top of the page) load faster. For instance, if a user opens a website to fill out a form, the necessary information should materialize first, followed by later content once buffering is complete.
• Asynchronously load JavaScript – To take up the least amount of load speed, sync your website to load in a multi-streamed method. This way, your pages can render more quickly as code scripts will linger in the background and only execute when ready.
• Lazy load images – More images mean a longer wait time. Lazy load images are only loaded once the user scrolls over them to be viewed. Facebook is a good example that uses this tactic to save server bandwidth and increase speed, and you can, too.
• Reduce plug-ins – Only include necessary plug-ins. Too many of them will slow your site down, result in crashes, and pose technical difficulties. You can try selectively disabling plug-ins to weed out the ones that are lowering site performance.

Follow these tips for faster, more reliable page load time. Remember, speed is imperative. Don’t let mediocre browser response times lessen users’ engagement with your content, or adversely impact your website’s success.