As an online entrepreneur, the number of conversions done in your website matters. In achieving this, your business site should be user-friendly enough to accommodate the needs of the visitors. If the site you are handling takes up too much time and brings inconvenience to the users, you are seconds away from losing conversion rates brought by your slow website.
In making a user-friendly business site, one of the elements that could make users bring website conversions is speed.
Here’s a fun fact. According to Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay could cause to decrease your page views by 11%, customer satisfaction by 16%, and lose conversions by 7%. Other than the ranking factor it contributes to the site, page speed clearly plays more important roles for the users. This goes to show how critical it is to speed up your site.
Make speed a priority on your site. Here are some tips that will get you started in increasing your website speed.
1. Minimize your resources
Running your web page with WYSIWYG resources may bring you convenience but with the messy codes they sometimes create, they can also slow your website big time. Unnecessary plug-ins, unnecessary codes add up to the size of your webpage. Hence, more resources indicate a slower site.
In order to minify resources, deactivate unnecessary plug-ins. You can also minify your HTML, CSSS, and JavaScript codes by using minifiers such as PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension and YUI Compressor.
2. Resize your images before you upload them.
Optimizing the content’s images is important since oversized images take longer to load. Keeping your images as small as possible by cropping the images to the correct size, reducing color depth, and removing image comments are always options that you can do.
Not only the size but you also have to focus on image’s format and attribute. The most recommendable for image would be JPEG. For the attribute, the HTML code for image is:
<img src=””>
3. Minimize redirects.
Redirects are instructions that instantly bring users from one page to another location. Every single redirect you remove will make your page load faster since redirects produce additional HTTP requests and increase load time. Considering mobile networks, redirects dramatically affects page speed in a bad way. In order to minimize redirects, learning the fundamentals of responsive design will do you better. You’ll learn to never link your page to a page that has a redirect on it. You’ll also know how to never require more than one redirect to get to any of your resources.
4. Enable browser caching
The elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or a temporary storage, so the next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.
The first time an individual comes to your website, they have to download the HTML document, stylesheets, javascript files and images before being able to use your page.
Some of those tips are easy to implement, but a few are advanced tactics that can be intimidating if you are not technically inclined.