Website speed optimization

Image by Louish Pixel

In the World of online business, website speed plays a very important role especially in getting website conversions.

Compared to 10 years back, people today are always in a rush so if they have to wait more than 5 seconds just for the site to load, they will turn back and go to another site instead (They will go to your competitor).

I still remember back during my era when computers take more than 5 minutes to load and for many of us, that wasn’t long at all!

Sigh, how times have changed but desperate times call for desperate measures which in this case, means making your website loads faster.

Why is it important to have a quick loading website?

Try to put yourself in a customer’s shoes when visiting a website, do you feel annoyed at the fact that the website loads so slow?

Here’s some of the common reasons every website owner should know of:

• People today are impatient and do not like to be kept waiting.
• There are loads of other websites doing almost the same thing as you so your visitors can just opt out of your site and go to the others just like that, with a click of a button.
• Customers will be skeptical when buying anything online because if your site can’t load fast, the transaction might fail.
• Visitors can have a better experience on your website (usability)
• Search engine spiders can crawl and index your website more efficiently (SEO)
• Let’s face it, slow websites look cheap and are of low quality.

Ways to get a faster website page load

Research shows that 16% of most online visitors will leave a site that take over 10 seconds to load.

If a website takes of 15 seconds to load, then that percentage of visitors who may bounce (Bounce refers to the visitors who left your site immediately after reaching without clicking on anything) increases to 50%.

As a result, it is important to acknowledge the load speed of your website, not only for the sake of users, but also for search engine optimization.

Here’s some ways that I personally use and so could you:

• Avoid the use of Flash media.

Flash media elements can be visually stimulating and interactive for users, but they significantly hinder the loading speed of websites.

Although Google spiders are now capable of crawling and indexing websites with Flash, it’s still likely that spiders will choke when they hit such coding structures.

If it is absolutely necessary to use Flash media, try to make the file as small as possible.

• Use external JavaScript and CSS files

External JavaScript and CSS files are beneficial in load speed optimization because they use certain coding technique that helps minimize the file size of webpages.

In short, external JavaScript and CSS files can be created on separate files with select elements then being brought onto webpages as needed.

If your website uses several different styles sheets, there may be opportunities to merge them into a single style sheet to reduced load speed.

• Minimize image size.

Compacting the size of large image files can significant reduce loading speed.

The initial step to do this entails pinpointing the images on your site that can be either eliminated or optimized.

In some cases, it may be appropriate to crop your images and use them in the form of thumbnails.

Even though this process can take a lot of work, these steps will increase the loading speed of your website tremendously.

• Use load speed optimization tools

There are a number of handy tools that are tailored specifically to reduce the load time of a page.

One such tool is the Labs tool in Google Webmaster Tools which can be gotten for free if you have a Google account and can help you pinpoint weaknesses on your website.

Conclusion

We live in a fast paced world today so if we don’t keep up with the speedy demands of today, we won’t be able to capture the business today so do take measures to increase your website speed as he who achieves that, will achieve the online business glory.

For more information on website optimization, do check out my review of Wealthy Affiliate here.

Also please feel free to share your feedback below as I’ll be very interested in hearing your experiences!