How to improve the speed of your website
Having a website that loads quickly is absolutely essential for business. Whether you offer online shopping or just use your website for a point of customer contact, it can be damaging for a business’ reputation if your page takes a long time to load. Website speed is critical to your business.
We live in an age where consumers demand information in an instant, so having to wait for images and information to appear, or waiting for a long time while a new page loads, can be frustrating for users.
Just having a website is not enough. How you optimise it and you how maintain it can be the difference between keeping and losing customers.
Load speeds
Improving the load speed of your site should be a top priority for your webpage. If you are unsure as to how fast your page loads, you can use a free page analyser tool, as provided by NCC Group, to get an idea about the site’s current performance.
The reasons for a slow running website are many. It could be that you simply have a slow connection speed in your area. However, it is more likely due to several easy to fix features on your current page that are dragging the loading time to an almost grinding halt.
Traffic
It could be loading slowly because you have just too many customers. While an influx of business can be a dream for generating revenue, it can also be a nightmare for a webpage.
If you expect high visitor numbers and increased popularity as your business grows, check how much traffic your webpage can take with load testing from NCC.
Too much web traffic on an internet page can significantly reduce loading speed and could even crash the whole thing entirely, leaving you without a vital source of revenue and customer contact.
Of course, we don’t know what is going to happen in the future, so keeping a constant monitoring of traffic levels should be a top priority.
If you continue to conduct regular checks, you can make appropriate changes when they are necessary to make sure your website can handle the pressure of increasing visits.
By July 1st 2014, Internet Live Stats recorded 2,925,249,355 global internet users. With more and more people getting online, and with an increasing range of devices—such as smartphones and tablets—and connectivity methods allowing people to use the internet on the move, it is vital that your business is ready for a spike in traffic.
Images, media and advertisements
If not, you could damage your business revenue and reputation.
What images have you used in the webpage design? Have you optimised them effectively to work with your site?
Unoptimised pictures and large files can be one of the main causes of a slow website. If you have a high number of images on the site this can be damaging too.
Resize or rescale the pictures, or even reduce the quality by 10 to 20 percent to help ensure a faster running speed.
If you have decided to include advertisements on your page to increase the money you make from clicks and visits, this could also be the cause of slow loading.
External media from advertisements can significantly decrease the running website speed, and pop-ups are a sure fire way to put off customers.
