With the internet home to nearly 2 billion websites, there is a lot of competition for the eyeballs of the hundreds of millions of daily internet users. In order to have a successful website, you need to stick out above the crowd.
Of course, you want your sites content, design and SEO to be top notch, but there is something else that might just be more important than them all, and this is your load time. How fast your website loads for new and existing users can be incredibly important to not only how many people visit your site, but also your bottom line.
If your load time is long, people could very well leave your site for a competitor as most people don’t want to spend even more than a few seconds waiting for a website to load. With that in mind, this article will look at a few tips that will help you to improve the loading time of your website.
Choose the Right Hosting Provider
No matter how much you tweak and customize your website to be faster and more intuitive, there is always a chance that its speed will be limited by your hosting provider. Now, there are dozens and dozens of different hosting providers out there and many are similar, but choosing one who boasts the fastest speed could help your load times improve.
Choosing a lightning-quick hosting provider is one of the most important factors to a faster load time. Be sure to do a lot of independent research and perhaps even try out a couple different providers to find one that works for you and provides speeds you are happy with.
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Optimize the Files on Your Website
The more files you have on your site, the longer it will take to load. While your site is home to a lot of files, the largest culprit when it comes to large load times are images. In fact, images take up a large portion of average bytes loaded per second on most web pages. This means that the reason why many sites are slow to load comes down to the images they use.
Of course, one way to reduce this issue is to remove some images from your site, but this isn’t something that everyone will be able to do. Instead, consider optimizing your images and other files. You want to ensure you are using the best file extension, and it also couldn’t hurt to run the photos through an optimization software, which can add some immediate benefits to load times.
Try to Minimize HTTP Requests
Every time a browser fetches a file, image or page from a web server, an HTTP request is counted. These can only be one at a time, so the more HTTP requests your site must make, the longer it will take to load. Because of this, reducing the number of HTTP requests your site makes can have an immediate and noticeable difference to load times.
So how do you go about minimizing these requests? Well, there are a number of different things you can do. These include combining files, reducing redirects, fixing any broken links you have on your site, loading only what you need to, and reducing the number of pictures or images on your site.
In conclusion, hopefully, this article has given you some helpful insight into improving the loading time of your website. A website that loads slowly will lose a ton of visitors, so be sure to use as many of these tips as you can.