When going online, the general consensus is that people don’t like to be kept waiting. They expect snappy results when seeking answers to their unanswered questions.
Even a one-second delay can mean the difference between a user choosing to remain on your site to read what you have to say or jump straight out again because of slow website loading time. Having a slow website is never a good thing and can drastically reduce user satisfaction and drop conversions. It also affects your organic search rankings.
So how do you change this and what might be the biggest contributing factor to slow website loading time?
The answer, the size of your website. Browsers take time to download all the code and data that make up your website, so the larger it is, the more time it takes.
But no one can fault you for having a big website, after all, users expect more engaging and interactive site designs and as time goes on, the size of your site’s resource files will continue to grow as you add new features. So how can you make sure that your site is both fast and attractive?
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for analysing this sort of thing and will provide you with the feedback that you need to fix the problems. Most fixes are relatively simple and the tool shows you exactly what to do. You should be sorted if you fix just enough to make the site experience better for your visitors.
Here are some additional helpful speed solutions to consider.
Reducing website loading time
- Scale down your images
- Enable browser caching to store data
- Look at reducing CSS loading time
- Keep scripts below the fold
1. Scale down your images
Images are the worst and most common culprits when it comes to bandwidth hogging. Scale and optimise your images appropriately so as not to affect the page loading time as much.
Optimising your images before uploading them is ideal. This way you won’t forget to do it when you add them to a webpage.
You can also make use of compression. Compressing images will drastically reduce image size without losing quality. There are many free online tools available for compression that will effectively reduce your image sizes.
2. Enable browser caching to store data
Enabling browser caching is an easy way to temporarily store data on a visitor’s computer so that they don’t need to download the same thing every time they visit your website.
The amount of time that the data remains cached depends on the visitor’s browser setup and your website’s server cache settings.
To set up browser caching on your server, speak to your hosting provider or look at GT Metrix to significantly improve your page loading times.
3. Look at reducing CSS loading time
CSS for your website will load before people get to see your site, so the longer it takes for the CSS to load on their devices, the longer they wait. Having optimised CSS allows for files to download faster, therefore, allowing visitors fast access to your pages.
If your website doesn’t make use of all CSS then get rid of the redundant code in all your files. Every little bit helps because wasted data will add up making for slow loading time that will scare your visitors away.
The next step is to minimise your CSS files. Stylesheets with extra space will increase your file size so when you minimise those CSS files, it removes that extra space from your code, making your files the smallest possible.
Check to see if your CMS already does the above job. If not, your website may require an additional plugin. For example, if you have a WordPress site, you can install the Hummingbird plugin to help with this.
4. Keep scripts below the fold
Javascript files have the ability to load after the rest of your webpage, but if you place them before your content, they will end up loading before any of your content does.
This means that people visiting your website will have to wait for Javascript to load before they get to see the page. Rather place all external Javascript files at the bottom of the page, before closing your body tag to prevent this from happening.
