Visitors will leave your site if it takes longer than two seconds to load. We live in an age of convenience and instant gratification.
Why wait for a slow web page to load when the competitor is faster?
You could be losing out on traffic and potential customers by having a slow website. Luckily, there are tons of things you can do to speed it up.
Keep reading to learn 5 easy ways to make your website faster.
1. Fix Broken Links
You likely use internal links to send visitors to another page on your website. If the page you’re sending them to no longer exists, the link is broken.
Instead, the visitor will get sent to an error page.
This makes finding what they were looking for harder. Most times, they'll give up and go to a different website.
You can use a broken link plugin to notify you of broken links on your website. As soon as you’re notified, edit the link and send it to an active page.
2. Get Rid of Extra Plugins
There are hundreds of different plugins that help your website do different things. It’s common to install plugins you think you need, but never use.
Unfortunately, those extra plugins are slowing down your website.
Check your website speed with this tool. One by one, remove extra plugins and check your speed after each removal. You’ll likely see an increase in page speeds.
3. Allow for Caching
When visitors come back to your website, the browser must re-download their information. This can slow down their browsing speed on your site.
By enabling caching on your website, return visitors’ information gets stored. There’s no need to re-download their info because it’s already in the cache.
Some of the best website design strategies focus on enabling caching. It’s crucial for speeding up the loading process for returning traffic.
4. Get a CDN
Did you know that the farther a visitor is from your server, the slower the loading speed is for them? This can be disastrous for international businesses that depend on global web traffic.
The best way to remedy this issue is to get a CDN.
A CDN connects to tons of servers all around the world. It disperses your site’s files across those international servers. Thus, proximity to your local server doesn’t affect foreign visitors' loading speeds.
5. Minimize Images
The bigger the image file, the longer it’ll take to load. If your website is picture-heavy, this could be a massive cause of slowness.
Ensure that your images get optimized and minimized. If the width of your blog page is 1200 pixels, ensure the width of your image isn’t bigger than that.
Use image minimizing tools to compress the files before uploading them to your website. This will ensure visitors aren't waiting too long for pages with images to load.
Want to Know More Ways to Speed Up a Slow Website?
The speed of your website impacts whether guests stick around. If a page takes too long to load, the visitor will leave.
You could be sending your competitors more traffic by having a slow website. Use the tips above to speed yours up and thus increase your traffic.
Website speed is just one element that affects your traffic and leads. Create a more successful website with a template from Strikingly. Build your brand and conquer the world without any coding needed.
