How fast does it take to load any webpage on your website? Do you know this also affects customer engagement? Recent surveys have revealed that 1-second delay in the time it takes a page to low will cause about 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, as well as 7% conversion loss.

In another study, Amazon found out that a 1% increase was experienced in review for every 0.1secs site speed improvement. All these clearly show that neglecting your website speed will only affect your ROI, whereas, you can expect an increase in page views, customer satisfaction, and rate of conversion if you can make your website faster. Some of the ways through which you can make your website faster include:

Improve Hosting Plan

Improving your hosting plan remains one of the simplest ways to speed up your website. The cheap plan you are using may be what is slowing down your website since you now require more resources compared to when you started. You can tackle this problem by upgrading to a faster hosting plan, or moving to VPS. San Antonio Website Design Company

Minimize HTTP Request

In a survey conducted by Yahoo, it was recorded that about 80% of the time it takes a webpage to load is spent downloading the different pieces-parts of the page. This pieces-parts range from images to scripts, stylesheets to Flash, and so forth. For each of these elements, an HTTP request is made. Hence, a page with lots of elements will take a longer time to load.

The fastest way to increase the speed of your site is by simplifying the web design. Keep a number of page elements simplified. You can make use of CSS instead of images. You can also combine multiple style sheets into one. Reducing and putting scripts at the bottom of the page is another good way to go.

By reducing the number of elements on a page, you will be able to reduce HTTP requests. Hence, improving site performance.

Enable compression

Large pages are often 100kb and more. Thus, they are usually bulky and download slowly. However, you can speed up their load time by zipping them. This can be achieved through compression. Compression helps to reduce the bandwidth of your pages, thus, reducing HTTP response. This can be done using a tool referred to as Gzip. Compressing is known to reduce download time by about 70%. Ensure that you set up your server to enable compression.

Enable Browser Caching

On visiting a website, the page elements are stored on your hard drive in a cache or temporary storage. Thus, your browser easily loads the page without having to send another HTTP server request on your next visit, since you have downloaded the HTML document, javascript files, stylesheets, and images during your initial visit. By enabling browser caching, you will make it possible for users to download page elements the first time they visit. Subsequent visits will only become faster.

Optimize Images

When it comes to images, it is important that you focus on three basic things: the image size, the image format, and the src attribute.

Image size – An oversized image will take a longer time to load. In order to keep images at the ideal sizes, you can use image editing tools to crop your images to the correct size. Ensure that the image you upload is right for the page size. You can also reduce color depth to the minimum acceptable level and remove image comments.

Image format – The best format for images is JPEG or PNG. Only use GIFs for small or simple graphics, and for animated images. Do not use TIFFs or BMPs.

Src attribute – After getting the right image size and format, ensure that you’re using the right codes. Try as much as possible to avoid empty image src codes. The HTML code for an image is:

Always ensure that there is a source in the quotation marks, as this will prevent unnecessary traffic that slows down servers. Take adequate time to re-size your images before you upload them. Ensure that the src attribute contains a valid URL. Ecommerce Web Design San Antonio

There you have it! The following are some of the ways you can make your website faster.

How long does it take your website to load? A slow website may not be good enough for your business. Get in touch with Nxt Gen Web today. We are the perfect web development company to help speed up and optimize your website.