As a business or blogger, you rely on your website. It’s the portal through which you communicate with your audience, encouraging them to subscribe or become paying customers. But if your website isn’t up to scratch, then you could be missing out, and it could be costing you big.
Customers expect a lot from your site. They want it to be beautiful, easy-to-use and intuitive. But there’s one thing that seems to matter more than everything else: speed. If your website doesn’t provide users with a smooth experience, then you’re dead in the water.
As hosting.co.uk points out, the speed of your web server is one of the most critical factors in determining the popularity of your website. For every additional half second that users have to wait for a page to load, you could lose up to 20 percent of traffic. Data suggests that a staggering 50 percent of people won’t wait three seconds before clicking back to search.
Increasing the speed of your website, however, is easy. There are all kinds of techniques that you can use. Let’s take a look at some of them now.
Use CDNs
CDN stands for “content delivery network.” It’s essentially a bunch of servers located in different places that feed segments of data from your web pages to your customer. One server might provide the text, another the menu, and a third, images or video. The idea is that by gathering data from multiple servers, a user can experience a faster-loading page according to moz.com.
Unless you’re a big company, you won’t be able to set up a CDN yourself, but the good news is that you don’t have to: web service providers already do this sort of the thing behind the scenes. All you have to do is find one that offers this kind of service.
Use A Fast Web Host
There’s a large spread in the speeds offered by web hosts. Some website service providers provide excellent bandwidth, allowing thousands of people to use your site concurrently without any slowdown, while others do not. Ideally, you need a web host provider that can offer you sufficient bandwidth to deal with peak loads. Use plugins to find out how many people use your website at any given time and then cross-check this with your web host to ensure that you can support the load.
Defer Javascript Loading
Javascript is still prevalent on many websites today, but it’s also a big resource hog. Deferring Javascript means allowing other elements on the page to load first before allowing Javascript elements to appear. Often, pages use Javascript for data-intensive objects, like images or video, and so deferring it will enable users to see the basics of the page, such as the text and menus quickly, without having to wait. The essentials load first and then come the Javascript elements after.
Check Network Issues
If your “time to first byte” is high, then check to see if you have any network issues. Often traffic or web server configuration can cause delays for users.
