Nearly 8 out of 10 Internet users do not return to a website whose performance did not satisfy them. The loading speed of a website plays a major role in the user experience. The display of pages must be fast enough to ensure a real comfort of navigation. In this guide, we will try to teach you how to make your website load faster, without much technical knowledge.
1. Do an audit of your website
The first step when it comes to optimizing the speed of your website is to determine how slow your site is, and, this is very easy to do. There are many tools available to measure the speed of your web pages. The most commonly used one is available here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights . Just enter your site’s URL, and it will give you a speed score.
Once you know your score, you can start improving the results.
2. Choose your hosting platform wisely
One of the things that will have the most impact on load time will probably be your choice of hosting platform.
Try to rely on established companies that have already proven they can support websites you know and that work well. Don’t get creative when it comes to hosting your website. You can probably save a few dollars by choosing a cheap provider for your infrastructure or services, but you’ll probably pay for it later. Sometimes, simply choosing a superior plan from your hosting provider can make your website load faster, with a single click in your site interface. Do not underestimate this.
3. Don’t use complex themes or animations
When choosing a theme for your website, it is important to pay special attention to its loading speed.
Some themes are beautiful but too complex or very badly designed. In this case, they can also significantly slow down the loading time of your business website.
Choose a theme that is as simple as possible, even if it means adding quality extensions to get the features you need.
This is much better than choosing a theme with complex layouts, flashy animations and many other unnecessary features.
4. Optimize your images
It is also crucial to note that the element that takes the longest time to load a web page is not the text, but usually the images. It is therefore extremely important to reduce the size of the images you use, without drastically reducing their quality, in order to reduce the page load time. The heavier an image is, the longer it will take to load.
Be careful though, compressing an image is often accompanied by a loss of quality, which is why it is important to be rigorous in the processing of images. If you rely on platforms such as Wix, Joomla or WordPress, there are many solutions that can do this automatically for you. All you’ll need is a plugin to install on your website, and the images will be automatically compressed.
5. Use a content delivery network
Once all these measures are in place, the last thing you should take a look at is using a CDN.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of caching servers that increases the speed at which content is accessed. In other words, this process allows you to store different resources on external servers in order to provide the Internet user with all the files he needs as quickly as possible.
It reduces the load on your servers, and ultimately, reduces the loading time of your website resources.
Some providers, such as https://cloudflare.com, even offer features that allow you to optimize the content of your website, using different optimization techniques.