How to improve your website’s speed Part 1
As the internet speeds increase around the world and mobile devices are ruling the web, the users are becoming less and less tolerant of slow load times. More than 50% of mobile users will abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, and nearly 10% of web users will bounce after 2 seconds. Is very clear that unless you deliver the right message in less than 5 seconds then you’ll start loosing traffic and your marketing investment.
At the same time, Google has stated unequivocally that page speed is a ranking factor in search results.
A fast website gets better results both from visitors and Google. In order to take advantage of these dual benefits, you need to make speed a priority on your website. Psynapsis.net Software & Digital Marketing Agency has created the next series of articles to help you improve your website’s speed.
Image Optimization
When someone visits your website, their browser has to load every part of the page. Generally the images are the parts that take the longest time to load. One of the best and easiest ways to get your pages loading faster is to optimize the images by re-sizing them and/or compressing.
Plugin Check
CMS systems like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal have plugins that are available to the administrator or developer to download and install for free or by paying a fee, this scripts require resources to run and when more resources are being used then your website will run slow.
To compensate this problem you can improve your server from a shared server to a private server to increase the speed of the machine that loads the website, this is not a cost effective solution so to fix this problem is to go through the plugin list and identify any plugins you aren’t actually using or that don’t seem to be adding anything worthwhile to your site performance then uninstall it and test the speed of your website. Psy Software & Digital Marketing Agency can run a FREE diagnostic and send the report to you including the items that are required to improve or fix on your website, fill out this form we’ll get back with you.
Scripts Up to Date
Depending on the CMS or e-commerce platform your site uses, you may need to check regularly to update your plugins and scripts. If some upgrades are required you should as soon as possible but making sure that you have a current backup file in place first.
Updating your scripts to the latest versions could go a long way toward eliminating problems that prevent your site from loading fast and avoiding having security breaches.
Psynapsis.net Software & Digital Marketing Agency recommends that if your site runs on WordPress, then you’ll find these updates within the Updates tab of your WordPress dashboard, take a look on the list and determine which ones are required and which ones are compatible with your Theme, Core system and other scripts versions. Make sure you have a backup of your databases, your themes, uploads and scripts before proceeding.
Use of CDN’s
A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that are housed around the world. In general, if you’re not using a CDN, your website will load from your web hosting server’s central location for every visitor to your site, no matter where they are geographically.
This can lead to slow site speeds, especially if your visitors are located far away from the central location of your server. Additionally, if you’re just using a single server and there is a high demand of traffic for example in a holiday sale or when you are making a live session there’s a chance it could get overloaded and cause your website to crash.
The use of a CDN will solve both of these problems by letting the users to access a cached version of your website from the server that is closest to them.
Is your website getting the speed and traffic that you need?
Psynapsis.net is a Software & Digital Marketing Agency that provides a wide range of services for all size of companies, for more information click here to contact us
