Tips to Optimise the Speed of Your Website
Cotswold Web • Feb 25, 2020
The first few seconds a visitor spends on your website are some of the most important.
If your site loads slowly, they may leave in search of a better site before looking at a single one of your products or services.
So, to avoid losing out on potential leads, sales or subscribers, it is essential to optimise the speed of your website.
Apart from decreasing your bounce rate and preventing visitors from leaving too soon, improving your site’s speed can help in three key areas:
- Searches/ visibility – Google considers a site’s load speed when ranking pages. Websites with slower load times may rank lower on search engines.
- Conversion – Faster load speeds will make it more likely for visitors to convert – whether that is buying something, subscribing or downloading content. Research has shown that consumers expect a page to load in two seconds. Even a delay of less than a second can lead to a seven per cent reduction in conversions.
- Experience – A good user experience will mean visitors spend longer on your site. The speed of your website is a key part of the visitor experience and a slow site will mean they are less likely to want to spend time browsing.
So website speed really is critical. Think your site needs to go a bit faster?
Here are our top tips to optimise the speed of your website.
Cut down on the plugins
Plugins are very useful in getting your website to do exactly what you want it to do. But having too many plugins can slow your site down. If you think your plugins may be causing your site to take too long to load, you can check the performance of each one.
Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox both have built-in performance tools, which will show you the load time for every file on your site. For a WordPress site, you can check for any issues with WP Checkup and you can test the speed of your site using a tool like Pingdom.
It doesn’t matter which tools you use to conduct your test. The key thing is to ask yourself whether each plugin on your site really is needed. If it isn’t essential, try removing the plugin and running the test again to see whether your load speed improves.
A site with 30 or more plugins could speed up by as much as 75% by removing any that are unnecessary.
Reduce image size
Images are an essential part of an attractive website, particularly an ecommerce site. But large image files can have a dramatic effect on the performance of your website.
It’s a fine line between maintaining picture quality and boosting the speed of your site, but there are a number of tools which can help you reduce the size of your images.
Smush is a great plugin for WordPress sites, while free tools like TinyPNG can be used for non-WordPress sites.
- Smush automates image compression on any images uploaded to the site’s media library.
- TinyPNG is reliable and easy to use and provides enough compression to speed up your site, without compromising on image quality.
Enable caching
If lots of people access a site at the same time, it can cause servers to slow down and pages to load slowly.
You can increase the speed of your site by caching the current version on your host’s content delivery network.
The content delivery network is a group of servers in different places, which work together to provide fast delivery of content on the internet. So a copy of your site will be saved on servers in a variety of different locations. When a visitor accesses your site, it will load from the nearest server, meaning it will load more quickly.
Most web hosts will give you the option to enable caching, or you can install plugins to do it yourself.
Don’t use too many redirects
Redirection is a technique for making a web page available under more than one URL. For example, you might have purchased your domain name in the ‘.co.uk’ and ‘.com’ formats. While your main URL is ‘.co.uk’, you will get redirects from anyone using ‘.com’.
It is also used for shortened URLs, either because they look better and are easier to remember than the underlying address, or to fit social media or instant messaging services where there is a character limit (using a service like bit.ly).
While redirection is useful, it does create additional HTTP requests, which can slow down your site.
To check if you have too many redirects, you can run a scan using a tool that checks all of the links on your site. There are a number of tools available, both free and paid, including Screaming Frog and Httpstatus.
Separate CSS and JavaScript files
Every image, file, JavaScript library (eg for slideshows) or stylesheet that has to be retrieved from a server to load your site requires an individual HTTP request. So the page a visitor is loading is reconstructed from individual requests for the different elements of that page, including text, images, video and layout.
Because each HTTP request takes times, having a lot of files will make pages load more slowly.
To cut down the number of HTTP requests, and therefore speed up the page, group all CSS files into one file and all JavaScript files into another.
There are a number of tools available to compress files into single requests automatically, and it is also possible to make manual code edits.
Cut down the web fonts
Web fonts are a feature that allows you to use custom fonts, which a visitor can easily load and view in their browser. These custom fonts are often retrieved from online services provided by Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts, but they can also be saved on your website’s server.
While they might look good and are becoming more popular, web fonts can reduce site speeds. So to ensure your pages load efficiently and your site runs as fast as possible, don’t use too many different fonts.
It is best to only download and embed the fonts you need. For most websites, two fonts with up to three variations (regular, italic and bold) should be sufficient.
Use a good web host
There are plenty of web hosts out there, but not all of them are the best quality or 100% reliable. Make sure your host isn’t overprovisioning its servers – that means hosting hundreds or even thousands of sites on the same server. The more sites on your host’s server, the slower each individual site will run.
If, after going through all of the other steps, you still aren’t happy with the load speed of your site, ask your host how many sites it has on the same server. A reputable host will be happy to give you an answer. If you feel there are too many sites on the server and it is having an adverse effect on your website, ask around for recommendations of good quality hosts you could move to.
By following these tips, you should be able to increase the speed of your site.
Even a small percentage increase will mean visitors are less likely to navigate away – and therefore more likely to make a purchase, subscribe to your site or download your content.
More Posts.
Heading 1 The best way to drive traffic to your website for most businesses is through search engines, so it is essential to secure a prominent position on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The two ways to do this are through search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The two options offer a different approach to generating leads and sales. Depending on what you are looking to achieve, either PPC or SEO might be better at reaching your business goals. With PPC, businesses bid on relevant keywords to appear as a sponsored link at the top of SERPs. When visitors search for those keywords, the ad will be displayed in the sponsored results section. A business only pays for the ad if the link is clicked. The most popular ads are Google Ads, but advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn (ADD LINK - Why you need LinkedIn paid ads for your business (cotswoldweb.co.uk)) (ADD LINK - Facebook Ads: Measure your conversions! (cotswoldweb.co.uk)) or other social media can be just as effective, depending on your own target audience. SEO is a long-term strategy to generate clicks without having to pay for them directly. It is about optimising your website content around relevant target keywords to convince a search engine that your business is a leading authority on a particular subject. Here we will discuss the pros and cons of each, and which delivers the better return on investment (ROI) for your marketing budget. One way to help you make a decision on which is the best option for your business is to check out the competition. They are targeting the same audience as you, so you can learn from their successes and their failures. If your competitors are investing heavily in PPC, it could indicate it would work well for your business too. And on the flipside, if they are ranking well in search results, investing in SEO could be the way forward.
Heading 1 LinkedIn might not be the first platform you think about for advertising your business. But if you’re looking for business-to-business (B2B) sales, you shouldn’t ignore LinkedIn’s paid ads. Most online advertising is geared towards business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses. In B2C, you can rely on mass advertising and big audiences. But B2B is all about being more focused on finding the right people. LinkedIn has an audience of 850 million professionals. They are potential customers for your B2B business. (For comparison, there are just over 3 billion Facebook users, but the demographic of Facebook is much more mixed, and its advertising is far more relevant than to a B2C audience.) While your own (or your company’s) LinkedIn profile might be active, your posts will only reach your direct connections. If direct connections comment on or share your post, it might then reach second- or third-degree connections. But it’s not going to reach even a fraction of the audience you want to target. Using paid ads on LinkedIn will take your reach way beyond your organic following. B2B buying has a much longer lead time than B2C. According to LinkedIn, the average B2B sales cycle is six to nine months. Advertising in the B2B sector is about building long-term relationships. And LinkedIn helps you to do that. LinkedIn says it helps businesses to ‘Target the professionals you care about’ and ‘Reach a qualified audience with sophisticated B2B targeting’. According to its own data: 180 million senior-level influencers are on LinkedIn Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions LinkedIn audiences are six times more likely to convert LinkedIn’s audience has double the buying power of the average web audience 40% of B2B marketers see LinkedIn as the most effective channel for driving high quality leads LinkedIn has a ready-made audience of professionals, a variety of ad types and the right data to help you target your advertising to reach the right audience. LinkedIn’s audience data is what it calls ‘deep zero-party data’. In other words, the data has been provided by LinkedIn members themselves – so it is trustworthy, accurate and frequently updated. This means your ads can be targeted at a very specific audience.
Heading 1 Facebook Ads are a very effective form of advertising for many businesses. But how effective? If you don’t measure your conversions, you really can’t be sure, as you will have no idea how good your return on investment (ROI) is. How to advertise on Facebook in 2021 (cotswoldweb.co.uk) By focusing on conversions, you can ensure you are reaching the right audience and measure your ROI to ensure you’re not paying more for a conversion than you should. First things first – what is a conversion? A conversion is when an ad achieves its purpose. It is an action or event which is part of a customer journey. Different businesses will have different actions which they class as conversions. The most obvious conversion is a sale, but it could also be booking a call, filling in an enquiry form or signing up for a subscription. You can track a huge number of metrics through Facebook Ads Manager (also known as Meta Ads Manager), so it is important to focus on the ones which are most relevant to your business and what you want to achieve. If the only conversion you are interested in is purchases, there is no point in tracking any other form of conversion.
Heading 1 You can invest as much time and money as you like into Google Ads. But if you don’t measure conversions, you will have no idea how effective they are for your business and how good your return on investment (ROI) is. A conversion happens every time your ad achieves its purpose. This isn’t just a sale. In fact, for many business to business (B2B) companies, booking a call or a prospective customer filling in an enquiry form is an important conversion. As a business, you decide on what counts as a conversion depending on your own business goals. Each business will have its own higher value conversions, which won’t be the same as those of other businesses. It is essential to always measure these conversions. It is the one definitive way of checking whether your ads are leading to those meaningful actions you want potential customers to take.
Heading 1 Using your website to promote your professional services business and sell to other businesses (business to business or B2B) is different from selling services direct to consumers (B2C). The cost involved for your customers is usually a lot higher than for consumer goods and services. Buying from another business is generally a big decision made over a longer period of time and often by a number of people. To compete in a competitive B2B marketplace, you need a clear and concise, fully responsive website, which can really showcase what you have to offer. Cotswold Web has worked on the website design of a variety of B2B professional services businesses from accountants to copywriting and IT services. Web design for B2B businesses is surprisingly cost effective and can make a real difference to your bottom line. Here are some of the fully responsive professional services business websites Cotswold Web has worked on…
Cotswold Web has worked on the website design of a variety of B2B businesses from wholesalers to contract electricians and even interior design for restaurants.