Optimising your website speed or load time is one of the key priorities for most businesses today. Data suggests that 60% of customers are likely to abandon a website with poor performance, which includes a slow website load time.  

Optimising website speed is also essential for SEO performance and user engagement. Top search engines like Google give high priority to web page speed, making it one of the determining factors for your website’s success. 

In this post, we’ll discuss website page speed and proven strategies to optimise your online space.  

What Is Website Page Speed?

Website page speed is the average time it takes for a webpage to fully load in a user’s web browser.  

Multiple factors can impact your page speed, such as the uploaded graphics, plugins, website theme, and website code.  

Slow websites can result in billions of revenue loss. On the other hand, fast-loading sites promote user engagement, organic search rankings, conversion rates, bounce rates, and customer loyalty. 

Top 5 Strategies to Improve Website Page Speed 

As a business owner, you need a high-performing website that captures visitors and turns them into paying customers. Here are proven strategies you can use to improve your webpage speed: 

  1. Choose the right web hosting service

The web hosting provider you choose plays a key role in your website’s performance.  

While several factors contribute to website speed issues, such as your web host’s location, its physical infrastructure, and your hosting’s overall bandwidth, the type of web hosting your website is using can impact performance just as significantly. 

There are three main types of web hosting services you can use here, including: 

  • Shared – One of the most cost-effective hosting plans as it splits hosting resources among multiple websites. But for websites with more online demands, this can cause issues like slow loading times (e.g. if your site gets consistently high traffic). 
  • VPS – A hosting service that logically segments dedicated services on a shared physical drive to improve overall performance.  
  • Dedicated – A relatively expensive option that offers an entire server with dedicated resources fit for businesses and enterprises with intensive online needs.  

Choosing an unreliable web host can negatively impact your website’s performance and user experience.  

Crazy Domains is one of the best web hosting services out there for speed-centric web hosting services. With an undivided focus on performance, we offer a wide array of hosting plans (Linux Hosting, Business Hosting) and solutions to kickstart your business online.  

If you’re already hosted with another provider, it’s easy to switch to a new one with these hosting transfer tips.  

  1. Cache your web pages

Caching is a proven method when it comes to improving the speed of your web pages. This works by storing copies of your website’s files to minimise the server’s load when generating and serving a web page to a visitor’s browser. 

Whenever a user accesses a web page, the server gets a request to fetch the necessary files. These files can be images, CSS files, or HTML documents.  

Caching allows you to store static files and other website elements on the server temporarily. This ensures users visiting the web page can create multiple requests, such that the server sends these cached files to their browsers, without compromising your site speed. 

  1. Optimise images

It takes up most of the server resources to load images, which impacts how long your website loads on a user’s browser. Particularly, uploading large files or too many images into your website can cause these slowdowns. 

To address this, apply these strategies to optimise your images and improve your website’s loading speed: 

  • Compress the images. There are several tools available online that you can use to reduce image size without sacrificing its quality. 
  • Use the right formats. Another way to optimise images and improve website speed is to use the most popular image formats. Among these are JPEGs for photos and PNGs for graphic images. Likewise, you can use the WebP format for lossless compression of images.  
  • Use CSS Sprites. CSS image sprites allow you to combine frequently used images, such as logos and buttons, to generate one CSS code that will load them all at once. This helps you improve website speed significantly as instead of downloading all images separately, you’ll be able to download them as one. 
  • Optimise alt text and titles. Incorporate descriptive alt text and image titles to improve your website’s SEO and accessibility.  

By taking steps to optimise your website’s images, you significantly improve your site’s performance, user satisfaction, and search engine rankings. 

  1. Reduce the redirects

Redirects work by forwarding visitors to a different URL as opposed to the one they have requested. This creates additional HTTP requests and requires extra processing time, leading to slower site speeds.  

While it’s not always possible to eliminate all redirects, keeping only the ones that are required helps you maintain fast-loading webpages.  

To manage redirects well, it’s best to use direct links when redirecting pages on your website. This will not only minimise redirect chains and speed up the load time but also enhance the overall performance of your entire website.  

  1. Use a content delivery network

A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a globally distributed network that helps improve website load speeds regardless of the user’s location. 

A CDN does this by hosting and delivering a copy of your website content to various servers worldwide. This helps optimise your site speed and performance by minimising the distance between the user’s browser and the host browser.  

User location also impacts the website speed, and the users who are away from the host browser will have to deal with slow webpages.  

A CDN helps address the issue as the traffic is distributed to different servers, which can then help the users access the content faster.  

Speed Up Your Website Today

Website load speed is crucial for offering a positive user experience and improving search engine rankings. By implementing the methods and strategies above, you can significantly improve your website’s load time—and bring good revenue to your business.  

It’s also equally important to ensure optimal performance by partnering with a reliable hosting service provider that offers secure servers and accessible customer support. Team up with Crazy Domains now and make the most out of your website!  

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