Top 3 Tips To Improve Your Website Load Speed

Nobody likes a slow website.

• Nearly half of all web users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 4 out 10 of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Before we begin, here’s a handy, FREE tool to measure your website’s load speed from Pingdom.

Top 3 tips to improve your website’s load speed

1) Reduce media sizes where possible

The size of images and videos has a drastic impact on the overall webpage size.

It can be easy to get carried away and put up a load of photos without remastering them for the web, but before you know it, you’ll have a webpage size of 13mb which will take a good several seconds to load.

Try to keep images below 300kb and host videos on third party websites such as Youtube or Vimeo.

2) Compress & condense your page’s code

You will likely need to speak to your web developer or a consultant to check this.

There are a lot of websites out there that have hundreds, if not thousands of lines of code that could be cut in half or taken out all together.

This reduces the amount of work your web browser has to do in order to render the web page, thus increasing the speed.

3) Find out info about your hosting environment

Ask your web host: What type of hosting do I have (i.e. Shared, VPS – Virtual Private Server, or Dedicated Server)? What is the server’s storage hardware? These contribute to how quickly your website loads.

We won’t go in to too much detail, but, in terms of load speeds, shared hosting is typically the slowest, with dedicated server hosting as the fastest and VPS hosting in the middle. This isn’t always the case as the speed does depend on various factors.

It’s also worth noting that while dedicated server hosting is the fastest it’s far more expensive than shared server or VPS hosting.

Ask or prioritise SSD storage servers over HDD Storage ones, SSD are typically faster.

The Extra Benefit: as well as user experience, website load speed has a positive effect (or rather no negative effects) with your search engine ranking. Google actively seeks to de-promote websites with slow load speeds.

Thinking of changing hosts? Take a look how we can host your website and save the environment here.