5 Tips for a Faster Website

How to Make Your Website Faster

April 24, 2023 10:30am Robyn Rivera

Site speed not only affects how visible your website is, but it also has an impact the kind of experience users have when they get there.

People don’t want to wait around for your website to load. They probably have better things to do with their time, and one of those things may include turning to a competitor who has a faster website.

A slow load time can lead people to click out of your website without ever going past the homepage or landing page, or to abandon their cart even after they’ve added products to it.

It reduces the number of pages Google is able to crawl and can hurt your organic search rankings, which can greatly reduce the number of people you are visible to online.

It’s clear that having a fast website is important for many reasons, but how can you ensure that your website is up to the test?

5 tips for a faster website

#1. Compress images

Large images are almost always part of the problem when you’re dealing with a slow website.

Failing to resize and compress images often leads to a web page with megabytes of images. Considering the fact that an entire web page should typically be no more than one megabyte, it’s easy to see how large images can cause such a lag in site speed.

Luckily, it’s easy to make a big difference in site speed by simply knowing how to resize, compress and optimize your images the right way. And, there are several online tools that you can use to compress the images on your site for free.

Websites 360® websites offer an easy-to-use image compression tool that allows you to compress all of your images at once, making it easy to keep your site lean and mean.

#2. Take advantage of caching

Like compressing images, browser caching is another simple thing that you can do that can make a big difference in the speed of your website.

Every single element on your website takes effort to load, and that effort is required every single time the site is loaded. But, the good news is that browser caching can help.

With browser caching, some of the previously loaded elements of your website will be remembered by the browser, which means that they won’t need to be reloaded again from scratch every time. And, even if the visitor goes to another page on your website, the common elements, like your logo and footers, will be remembered there, too.

As you can imagine, because this significantly reduces the number of elements that need to be loaded with each new page, this often results in a big boost to page speed.

#3. Consider switching to a new web host

There are a lot of ways to cut costs online, but one way you should never do is to choose a cheap web host.

While, yes, your website will probably be available, and you’ll even save a few dollars, the result will be a slow-loading site that will frustrate your visitors to no end.

Cheap web hosts like to cram as many websites as possible onto one server, regardless of what it does to the performance of those sites.

You don’t necessarily have to spend an arm and a leg on a quality web host; many perfectly acceptable web hosts are comparably priced to the budget options.

But, no matter the price point, it pays off to do a little research and testing when selecting a web host.

#4. Implement AMP on your website

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it’s a framework that’s designed to create mobile pages that load fast, enabling site publishers to improve site speed for their mobile readers without having to sacrifice ad revenue.

For years, Google’s algorithm only considered the speed of a website on desktop when determining its ranking, but mobile site speed has become incredibly important in recent years. That’s, in large part, thanks to The Speed Update, which was released in 2018.

With this update, Google started penalizing only the pages that provide the slowest experience for users. And, when you implement AMP on your website, you can help to ensure that it’s not one of them.

#5. Minify the coding

Minimizing the HTML, Javascript and CSS coding on your website is another great way to dramatically reduce its loading time.

Optimizing the code involves removing commas, spaces and other characters that aren’t totally necessary, as well as removing formatting, code comments and any code that’s no longer being used. It also involves removing duplicate code and shortening code when possible.

Don’t worry if you’re not a coding genius. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you minify the coding on your site. Google even offers its own recommendations for resources to help you minify the coding on your site.

Whether you have an existing website already or you’re in the process of building your own with the Websites 360®website builder, it’s always important to keep site speed in mind.

Originally published 1/23/20