Imagine, your prospective customer who is running short of time, and is on a lookout for something that you offer, searches it on Google, and emerge in searches, quite some seemingly good options, with yours being on top. They click on the link to your website, and starts loading your website. There it loads, loads, and keeps loading, only to upset them. All they do is abandon your website and go back to search results for better options that can load quickly to get them quick results.
Ohh.. you lost a customer!
Well, you may assume it to be not that worthy but then, you lost, and that’s the reality.
Despite the fact that your website was optimized enough to emerge on top of the search engine result pages, and was very innovatively designed, yet it lost all its glory, all because of one single factor – its turtle loading speed.
Often it happens that we go overboard with other performance factors like website design, and especially its look, and tend to forget about its loading speed, which comes to the notice right at the very beginning the entire website performance.
No matter how hard you work on your website, unless it’s loading speed is optimized, you keep spinning your wheels, only to be disappointed in the end.
Yes, website speed is so crucial! In fact, the bad speed of your website leading to its abandonment, adding to its bounce rate, may eventually even impact its ranking on search engines. And the worst part is, that the visitors never return ever in future, so once you lose, you lose it forever.
Get your website speed assessment test done time to time. Lower gets your website speed, the higher get its bounce rate. The higher go the bounce rate, the lower become the conversion rate. Therefore, it is important to get the website speed optimization done.
According to a study conducted on neural network containing massive bounce rate and conversions data, it was found that as the page load time goes up on a scale of one second to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce rate increases by 123%.
There may be many culprit factors for this, like the number of content elements, such as text and images, which when goes up, drops the conversion rate drastically.
According to the latest statistics about website load speed, collected from some 5000 websites, it is concluded that publishers have been finding it really challenging to get high page speed, with average score being 44, which is labelled as ‘poor’ by search engines.
There can be multiple reasons for a website’s bad load time like – under-optimized images, many HTTP requests, messy coding, JavaScript issues, too many ads flashing, bad web hosting service, no use of Content Delivery Network (CDN), Caching issues, huge media files, heavy plugins, and more.
This clearly indicates of the amount of consideration required from site owners and their web developers, to get their website on the competitive edge on search engines, especially Google.
Now the questions arise:
How to optimize a website speed?
How to measure a website speed?
How to increase a website speed?
Well, all this questions will be answered if we look at these six quick tips you can smarten your website with, especially by boosting up its speed for an ultimate user experience and performance.
1. Go with Smart Hosting on a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN, the wide network of servers significantly reduces the distance between server and the user, and therefore minimizes the delays in web page load speed.
A great amount of bandwidth is saved when the media files are hosted on CDN. This minimizes the load on a single server, leading to quick load time. Not only this, even the probability of Distributed Denial-of-Serve (DDoS) attacks is also minimized owing to the reduced traffic.
You can also reduce the size of your files by compressing them with Gzip, a file format that locates and replaces strings of code in the text files, to shorten them. So make your website Gzip enabled.
2. Reduce the Number of HTTP requests
HTTP requests refer to the downloading requests for every component of the on-page content. The requests are generated for every element of the webpage content, whether it is an image, plugin, ad, etc. Every request needs to be met to enable the webpage to load completely. More the components, more the load time will be.
To reduce this time, you need to reduce the number of components. So, as you start on this mission, pick out the spare components that you don’t need and remove them. This may be difficult initially as every component would seem to be important to you.
You can even merge the files to minimize the number of requests. Make sure you have sorted formats and codes, and you can do that by removing extra indents and spaces, or else the code may turn out to be messy.
3. Enable Caching in Browser
What if you have to carry the huge luggage to a place where you visit frequently. Carrying the same load again and again to the same place would quite be bothersome, isn’t it?
To minimize your headache and of course, your body ache, you would drop a major part of the luggage, there only. Same goes for the website, which when visited by the user, leaves its elements like images, stylesheets, and javascript files on their hard drive in a cache, or what we call as temporary storage. So, the next time you visit the site, the load time will automatically be minimized with relatively lesser requests to be met.
As Tenni Theurer, GM and VP of Product Management, Verizon Media explains, “40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache, so it’s critical that you make your page fast for these first-time visitors. But enabling caching can shave off a significant amount of time of returning visitors and provide a better user experience.”
4. Bring Down the Size of Images
Heavy websites loaded with big size images is the most common reason behind low website speed. Of course, the images ought to be in good number entice and engage the users, yet they may hamper the website performance by making it bulky enough to load quickly.
No, you don’t have to remove them completely. They are the soul of the webpage design, especially of an eCommerce website, how can you?
Unless an eCommerce website has ample images to display the product, it cannot convince the potential buyers. Do you know, about 65% of consumers have expressed their desire to see minimum three pictures of the product, so that they can think about making the purchase.
So, you just can’t do away with deleting the images. Better you compress them to reduce their size. This can be done either by cropping the images or by using various tools. If it is a WordPress website, then WP Smush can be a wonderful tool for contracting the image size. Well, for rest of the websites, Compressor.io can quite be good one.
In a study, it was reported that by minimizing the sizes of images from 22MB to 300KB, the waiting time for the user was reduced by 70%!
Plugins play a massive role by adding functionality to a WordPress website for a great user experience. They also simplify the code by eliminating all the mess. Their quick and easy installation, at times, leads to too many of them, overcrowding the website without giving you a hint of the issues it would lead to, like – bad website load speed, vulnerable security, maintenance issues, and many more technical glitches.
Simply take a note of all the plugins that have turned out to be obsolete and badly configured, and deleting them, and yo, you’re done!
Plugin performance can be evaluated in many ways.
6. Cut Down the Number of Redirects
A dynamic website undergoes changes at a constant level. Many of its pages are moved or deleted, obviously giving rise to redirects which save the website from broken links. But too many of them may lower the website speed and performance, as they create more HTTP requests needed to be met during the load time.
So, to improve the speed, minimize the number of redirects as many as you can, obviously on the basis of their individual relevance.
Finding the website speed such a crucial factor for defining conversion rate, more and more companies are opting for website speed and performance optimization service.
On Concluding Notes
It though can quite be challenging to significantly improve your website speed and its overall performance, as there are many more factors to be considered, that are not for the minute and would take their own time. Till then, you need to be aware about, and work on these tips to start making difference.
Tarika Technologies offers premium web design and development services that are highly competitive and focused at delivering optimum performance. As a leading web design & development agency, we design, develop and deploy a range of web applications, considering all crucial aspects like website speed, responsiveness, navigation, consistency, and lot more.
Joe leads the company’s strategy development and team building processes to formulate and enact the mission and goals. His strategic decisions involve the commitment of various resources for the fulfilment of goals and purposes of the organization, with a positive impact on its various aspects of growth.
With over 30 years of leadership experience, Joe has lead transformation projects, new business ventures, and execution of change management strategies.
In his previous role in C/C Financial Corp, a start-up financial technology business, Joe served as President & CEO. The start-up was scaled up and acquired by a large publicly traded company.
Joe started PeakFormance Leadership Consulting, a leadership and strategy advisory firm that specializes in helping busy executives develop high-performing team and organizations. His experience and proven strategies have helped him lead organization development projects with Fortune 500 companies as well as small to medium size start-ups.
With a strong passion for leadership, Joe has demonstrated the ability to develop cohesive teams, aligned and collaborative teams that achieve extraordinary results. Joe’s passion for leadership and team-building and vast experience enable him to connect with executive leaders and partner with them to improve performance.
Joe holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Minnesota State University, and an MBA in Organization Leadership from Walden University. He enjoys spending time traveling, golfing and training for Ironman triathlon competitions.
WILLIAM ANSAH
Head of Africa Operations, Tarika Group
20+ years of professional experience
William Yaw Ansah, Chairman, and CEO, Origin8 Limited in Ghana is an accomplished executive with experience spanning multiple sectors – Publishing, International NGOs, Education, Consultancy, and more.
Most recently, William was appointed as Course Manual Author Monitor for Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana. He was also appointed as a Member of the Management Committee, School of Arts, University of Ghana. He is also a Member of the Institute of Directors Ghana, an Accredited Member of the Institute of Public Relations, and a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketers, U.K
Over the years, he has been a mentor and advisor to a number of new ventures in Ghana and has trained several organizations such as SSNIT, Ghana Revenue Authority, Ghana Water Company Limited, National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme among others.
William has authored a number of books such as Simple English for Senior High Schools in Ghana, Simple English books for Primary Schools in Ghana, and Simple English books for kindergarten, among others.
William received his Master’s degree in Global Marketing from the University of Liverpool, the U.K, and a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Ghana, Ghana. He started his career in Ghana as an Instructor, Consultant, and later management member of Afram Publications, Sahabia Publications, Comland Ghana, Origin8 Limited to mention a few.
SACHIN AGRAWAL
Founder & CEO, Tarika Group
20+ years of professional experience
Sachin has over twenty years of experience managing innovation and development of solutions and optimizing complex business processes; Business & Technology Architecture and Integrations. His proficient leadership and exceptional communication skills, technical expertise, combined with industry experience have delivered extraordinary results for his firm and clients.
Sachin instituted Tarika Technologies to support businesses by implementing a strong process-oriented system and the virtual CIO model, managing a team of offshore and onsite professionals. He performs complete business and technology assessment, advises on Enterprise Architecture and provides solutions for mid to large companies, globally. Under his leadership, Tarika Technologies has acquired several key accounts, providing Enterprise Solutions, Infrastructure Solutions (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS), Software & Web Solutions and Mobile Applications.
In addition, Tarika Technologies provides technology and communications infrastructure set up and has successfully launched several products in the ERP, Communication, Entertainment & Media domains. Today, Tarika stands as a global company with presence in America, Asia, and Africa.
Sachin is the CIO to a leading firm in Bethesda, Maryland USA that provides acquisition support services; and technical advisor to the Crisis Center Hotline located in the state of Maryland in the United States. During his career, he also served as Director of Information Technology at a prestigious infrastructure management firm in the DC area providing IT consulting, infrastructure design and enterprise solutions for small to large corporations all around the mid-Atlantic region, as well as governmental organizations. His innovation in business process has led to a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Offices for one of his clients.
Sachin’s keen interest in International business has formed key alliances and relationships worldwide apart from just Technology. In recent times, he has partnered with Origin8 Limited, a leading PR & Advertisement firm located in Ghana, extending all the products and services offered by Tarika to the African region. As an integral part of this partnership, Origin8 will be heading the sales and marketing of EBIMS AirWatch in the West African market; a cloud-based ERP solution by Tarika, supporting the needs in the Media industry providing real time strategic planning, monitoring, management of operations, automation of collections and complete digitization of payments through integrations to local payment gateways. He is also the Chief Technology Advisor for Origin8 Limited, driving advanced digital solutions for clients in Ghana; and introducing customized ERP for businesses across West Africa.
His keen interest in international business has formed key alliances and relationships worldwide in areas aside technology. Other areas of his expertise include managing and streamlining business processes, vertically independent Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure Management, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, high-level network and systems architecture, design and development capabilities of secure distributed applications for both private as well as governmental organizations.
Sachin holds a Master of Science in Information Architecture with highest honors; a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Associates in Computer Engineering Technology from Capitol Technology University in Maryland, USA. In his leisure, Mr. Agrawal enjoys playing musical instruments and practices Haidong Gumdo, the Korean swordsmanship, as a senior martial arts practitioner. His personal blog can be found at www.sachinagrawal.com.
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