How to Improve Page Speed of your Website

The web page speed of your website is an important ranking factor without any doubts. If you think that increasing speed of your website is not important, think again! Everyone wants results in seconds; no one wants to wait longer for the information one is seeking. Imagine you are searching something over the internet, but the website you find is taking more time than normal, do you wait for it to appear or do you toggle to another website? Obviously, you will start searching over some other site.

Customers expect the website to load in 3 seconds or less than 3 seconds. The low speed of your web page is a sheer loss to your business. You are losing your website traffic, visitors, which in turn will lead to lower ROI (Return on Investment), increase bounce rate and ultimately less conversions. Improving page speed for SEO is also important. SEO Services India offer services which are designed to increase the page speed.

Here are some tips on how to improve speed of your website-

Optimize Images

Ensure that your website do not have any high resolution images, which take longer time to load. Heavy images obstruct speed of the site which consumes more bandwidth resulting in slow speed. Compress your image size with the help of tools. Resizing image size is also a good option. Do not upload large files before cropping them or adjusting their size.

Minimize Javascript and CSS Files

Loading of heavy JavaScript and CSS files could be one of the reasons for the slow speed of your website. If your website contains many JavaScript and CSS files, try to combine these files into one large file. As whenever any user visits your website, it will direct a large number of HTTP requests to start. Each request is treated as individually by the browser which increases the number of requests. You can reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining files so that instead of opening ten separate requests, it will open one request. No doubt, it will improve the speed of your website.

Browser Caching

When anyone visits your website, the assets of the page visited get stored on the hard drive in a cache or a temporary storage. Whenever you will visit site next time, the browser will load the same page without raising any HTTP requests. The web page does not appear again and again for each user, it will use the version stored on the browser. Browser caching enables the first page of the site to load speedily so that user can easily browse the whole site. This, in turn, helps in improving the speed of the website.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically spread group of web servers that work together in order to provide fast delivery of web content to the users. Whenever any visitor visits your website, CDN uploads the content from the server located at the nearest location. It decreases the time taken to process user requests as with CDN, user requesters are transmitted to the nearest server, which results in an increase in speed of the site.

Decrease the number of Plugins

Plugins are an important part of each website; they add extra features which are otherwise not available in the themes. Having a lot of plugins can slower your website as they need loading of javascript and css files to collect data. Keep a check on the plugins present on your website and make sure that you reduce or remove plugins which you are not using. Try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts which need more resources to run them. Keep only necessary plugins which you need for your website and ensure that they are up to date. It will help in improving the speed.

Reduce Redirects

Redirects also create additional HTTP requests as plugins do and makes your website slower. Therefore, it becomes important to reduce the number of redirects from your site. It is advisable to eliminate them completely, but if you cannot avoid redirects, then keep them minimum. You can identify redirects running on your website by running a site scan. This will help you in keeping necessary and required redirects only, and removing all unnecessary redirects which do not serve any purpose.

Nikhil Agrawal

Nikhil Agrawal is the Director of Digital Marketing and Strategy of IS Global Web, a leading digital marketing agency that provides world-class search marketing services and web & application development. He has extensive experience across digital marketing verticals for over 10 years. He is helping many businesses for their search traffic, conversion optimization, product launches and their online presence. You can find Nikhil on LinkedIn & Twitter.

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