It's no secret that website load time matters a lot to visitors. Statistics show that users abandon websites if they load too slowly, but how slow is too slow?
According to recent data, a mobile website that takes more than three seconds to load will lose up to 53% of visitors. If the website is accessed via PC, expect to lose up to 47% of all users if the website loads in two seconds or more. Despite this, 70% of mobile websites take more than five seconds to load.
The explanation for the high number of visitors abandoning the website is the frustration of waiting for the page to load. However, load time also matters to Google, so if you're working to improve your SEO, load time should be a factor you focus on.
Tip #1: Optimize images
One of the keys to an engaging and user-friendly web design is high-quality images. But if they're not compressed properly, images take up a lot of space and slow down your pages. Images make up about 21% of your website's total size and large uncompressed images can quickly slow down your website.
The good news is that image optimization is one of the simplest ways to improve website load time. The key is to find the balance between the smallest image size you can have while maintaining high quality. The most straightforward way to achieve this is through image compression.
You can do image compression with programs like Adobe Photoshop or you can compress your images directly on your website using plugins. It's also important to choose the right format. Stick to PNG files for graphics and JPEG for photographs. In addition to compression and resizing, you can also combine images using CSS sprites. CSS sprites make all your images into one large image so it loads all at once instead of separately.
Tip #2: Compress files
Images aren't the only files on your website that take up too much space. Bloated CSS, HTML, audio files, videos and JavaScript files can cause your website to load slowly. Compressing files can be as simple as grouping CSS files together or removing HTML code.
However, the most popular way to compress files on your website is through Gzip, which is a file format and software solution. All in all, just like images, you want to ensure you don't slow down download times by having unnecessarily large files.
Tip #3: Reduce redirects
When a user tries to go to one website but is instead sent to another, it's a redirect. It's like being given a direction to a site that then tells you to go back and continue to a new site. It's a waste of time and effort for the server and increases loading time. If there are any redirects you can remove, do so. Avoid sending users to a page that has a redirect and also avoid search engines that optimize pages with redirects. The fewer redirects your website has, the faster it will load.
Tip 4: Take advantage of browser caching
Use browser caching on your website. This means saving copies of a website's static content so that when you return, you don't have to reload the entire page again. Static content includes HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript. As a website owner, you can tell browsers how long to store cached content. To maximize your load times, you can leverage browser cache time to speed up your website's load time. Using the power of caching reduces bandwidth consumption, reduces the number of server requests and generally provides a better user experience.
You can modify the .htaccess file via an FTP client. Alternatively, if you're on WordPress, there are a number of different caching plugins available. Ask Mr. Toucans.
Tip #5: Use a content delivery network
A content delivery network, or CDN (Content Delivery Network), can be just what your website needs to speed up loading times. A CDN is a distributed server system that hosts your website's files over a large network of servers located across the globe. This reduces your website's load time by allowing visitors to download files from the server closest to them geographically. This means that no matter where in the world your visitors are located, they will experience the same loading time. The CDN is synchronized simultaneously across the globe. To use a CDN on your website, simply find a service provider and register your website, which Mr. Toucans offers.
Increase your page speed to achieve good SEO results
While Google is closed about how they use website speed in their algorithms, they have used speed as a scoring factor for both desktop and mobile websites for several years.
Google is concerned with giving visitors the best possible experience on the search engine, which largely means that visitors find the right information quickly and easily. If the bounce rate is low and stable and the website shows long visit frequencies, Google will view the website positively and prioritize it in relation to the keywords used (SEO). High load times help your website to be prioritized in Google's algorithms and thus place your website higher in the search results. If you invest time, money and energy in search engine optimization, the last thing you want is to lose visitors due to long load times, so here are five surefire tactics to increase website load time.
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