Cut Down on your Site’s Loading Time with these 4 Simple Techniques

 

Consumers expect websites to open within two seconds or less. As a matter of fact, it’s estimated that 47 percent of visitors will leave a website if it takes any longer. That equates to, no matter how amazing your site or brand is, it’s useless to a certain percentage of visitors if its’ loading page speed takes any longer than a couple seconds.

 

Keep in mind that slow speeds are annoying and can also affect organic search engine rankings. Google’s SEO algorithms place a lot of weight on page loading speed. If you have speed issues, believe us when we say, it will eventually cost you. Analyze your site’s current loading time. Consider it in comparison with your competitors’ sites. Tools like Google’s PageSpeed are great ways to figure this out. If you’re looking to cut down on yours, consider these 4 simple techniques.

 

Enable browse and site cache

 

When enabled, caching stores static data which enables visitors to access their web pages significantly faster. Static data includes HTML and images. Caching can help make it feel like your site’s loading speed is faster than what it really is. That’s because the database of the website won’t be required to retrieve every file every time a user clicks on the page, depending on if they’ve visited before.

 

Load-optimized images

 

The larger the size of your images, the more time it will take for them to load. In most cases, your images do not need to be as big as they are. If you’re looking to reduce loading time, one of the first places that most web designers will look is to cutting down on the size of images used throughout. By reducing the volume of information these images carry, you’ll be surprised at how much of a difference this can make in increasing page load time.

 

Restricting external scripts

 

Any time a new library or additional feature is added to a site, the external scripts associated with them could mean new HTTP requests any time the page loads. This evidently means an increase in load time. Therefore, take into account how many libraries or additional features are being added and use your website design expert to limit the number of external scripts.

 

Clean up the code

 

Get rid of anything that doesn’t need to be there in the programming code. They can accumulate rather quickly causing increased loading time. Eliminate unnecessary coding, any excessive backups created and stored on your server, heavy database files that don’t need to be there, and any unused plug-ins.

 

If all these techniques fail, the last resort taken should be to upgrade the web hosting plan. By providing more dedicated hosting space, this can also increase your site’s loading speed. That said, it comes at a higher cost than any of the other techniques included here.

 

Unlimited Exposure is an experienced Toronto digital marketing agency specializing in web design, programming, and search engine optimization (SEO). Speak with a representative and partner with the experts in website design and marketing. Long-term results, increased revenues, and more traffic than you’ve ever had is what awaits when you take on Unlimited Exposure as your exclusive marketer. An Unlimited Exposure expert can perform a site-wide audit, identify the opportunities to increase your site speed, and work diligently to implement the necessary solutions.