Improving your websites speed not only affects the user experience it also affects your websites SEO. Slow sites are penalized by search engines like Google and will see their rankings decrease as their load times increase. Search engines want to provide their users with the best possible user experience, fast sites improve the quality of a users experience and increases user satisfaction. In fact Google has spoken out about the impacts of slow load times on SEO. “Experiments demonstrate that increasing web search latency 100 to 400 ms reduces the daily number of searches per user by 0.2% to 0.6%. Furthermore, users do fewer searches the longer they are exposed. For longer delays, the loss of searches persists for a time even after latency returns to previous levels.” You can see why placing an importance on your website’s load speed is critical to ensuring it ranks well on search engines and keeping users engaged.
There are a number of factors that can affect your website’s load speed. Making sure you are using proper solutions and maintaining your site properly will help in making your site faster. We will go through a number of factors that can have an impact on how fast your website load times are.
Your Website’s Server
Choosing the proper hosting service for your website can have a significant impact on your websites overall speed. Hosting with a reputable and professional service can go a long way in ensuring your website will have fast load times. At Konstruct we offer high end hosting services that make certain your website will always provide fast load speeds.
Leverage Browser Caching
Ensuring your website is utilizing browser caching will go a long ways in improving your load speeds. When you enable browser caching on your website the browser a user is using to view your website will cache resources and images from your website. This means the next time the same user returns to your website the browser will already have those resources and images available. As a result the browser will no longer have to wait to load components on your site and instead presents them immediately from its cache.
Minify your Files
Minifying your static files such as HTML, CSS and Javascript can help improve your website load speeds. Minifying these files essentially removes any non-essential information or code reducing their file size. By shrinking the size of your code files the users browser has less to load making the site load faster. There are online tools that will automatically minify your site files for you. If you are using WordPress then there are plugins like WP Rocket and Autoptimize that will also automatically minify your files.
Optimize your Images
Large image files are very commonly to blame for slow website load speeds. Using images that have unnecessarily large dimensions, for example in excess of 3000 pixels in height or width, can bring your load speeds to a crawl. Making the dimensions of your images smaller will significantly decrease their file sizes. Another great way of decreasing the size of your image files is by using the save for web or export as tools in photoshop. These tools allow you to control the image file type and quality while displaying the effects on the images file size. If you are using WordPress there are some great image optimization plugins such as Imagify or Smush.it that can help decrease image file sizes.
Use Less Redirects
If your website utilizes a lot of redirects this will have a negative effect on your load speeds. Redirects trigger an extra HTTP request that adds latency to your page load speeds. Your website should only use redirects when technically necessary. Ensuring your website is not using redirected links internally will help with load speeds, and making sure there are no redirect chains or loops is also important.
Even More Factors
There are many more factors that can affect your websites speed, but we have outlined some of the most important ones above. If your website is suffering from slow load speeds and you cannot find a solution the expert team at Konstruct Interactive can help. We have an experienced and knowledgeable team of developers and SEO experts ready to improve your websites speed. For more information on how we can help you please contact us.
