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6 Tips for a Fast Speed Driveway Sealer Website

Website Tips and Tricks

Ensuring your driveway sealer company’s website operates at a fast speed is all-important.

Nowadays, if visitors can’t load your site within two to three seconds, they’ll leave and go elsewhere. Most likely to your competitor’s website.

In fact, Amazon and Google have tracked and analyzed the metrics on abandonment. Amazon found that an extra second’s worth of load delay led to a 1% decrease in sales. Google noted a 20% abandonment rate after just an extra half-second.

Additionally, a slow load time can affect your search engine ranking.

Search engines take into account many factors when it comes to ranking a website. Those factors allow them to determine a site’s legitimacy and trustworthiness.

Legitimate and trustworthy sites are ranked highest while questionable sites are ranked lowest. If a site is too questionable, it may not rank at all. In that case, the search engine won’t display it on any of its result pages.

One of the factors that search engines take into account is site speed. Fast speed is an indication that the site is maintained and hosted via a high-quality web host.

For these reasons, you need to make sure your drive sealer company’s site speed is fast.

6 Tips for Making Sure Your Site Maintains A Fast Speed

There are many factors that contribute to a website’s load time. For example, numerous elements can greatly increase the speed at which your company’s site loads.

Let’s take a look at six tips for making sure your website maintains a fast speed.

1. Uninstall Unneeded Add-Ons And Plug-Ins

Many businesses opt to use a website builder such as WordPress to create their websites.

WordPress is a nice website builder. Unfortunately, it tends to include unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons in its templates. The same goes for other website builders.

Extra plug-ins and add-ins can utilize additional scripts, including flash. For this reason, they tend to slow down the sites on which they are used.

You won’t sell many oil based driveway sealers if your site is too slow for customers to access your services.

It would be one thing if your website actually needed these plug-ins and add-ins. But many times, it doesn’t.

As such, it is wise to hire a professional web host to host your website. The host will control which elements are included on your website and which aren’t.

2. Code Optimization

Servers and browsers read only the essential parts of your website’s code. As such, extra code included by developers tends to slow your site’s load time.

Extra code can be anything from old, hidden Javascript to unneeded spaces and commas in your HTML and CSS markup.

For this reason, you’ll want to optimize your site’s code.

Code optimization eliminates all unnecessary code. It entails combining code where available and then deleting the leftover code.

Code optimization is a task that should be performed only by a professional web developer. Coding languages are very tricky. One deleted bracket can make your entire site crash.

If that happens, you’ll have to go through your entire site’s code to find the one flaw.

Plus, professional web developers know multiple coding languages. They can identify HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, and others. They will know how to tweak them correctly.

3. Image Optimization

Large images can take a long time to load.

For that reason, it’s important to evaluate every image on your website. Does it need to be as large as it is? If it doesn’t, it’s best to scale it to a smaller size.

It is important to note that you can make images appear smaller using HTML code. However, the code doesn’t change the actual size of the image — just how it appears.

Let’s say you have an image on your site that is 2000 x 2000 pixels. You need it to fill a 200 x 200 space, so you shrink its appearance using HTML.

Because the image isn’t actually smaller, it will still load as though it appeared as its actual size. In other words, the image will take a long time to load.

As a result, your site will lag.

For that reason, you use an image editing program to actually scale down the image to 200 x 200 pixels.

4. Browser Caching

Browsers store all sorts of information in their caches. That information includes code files, stylesheets, and images.

Many websites allow browsers to store that information. That way, when visitors return, the browser simply recalls the website’s information. The result is a much faster load time.

As such, it is a good idea to enable your site to store information in browser caches.

How long a cache stores your website’s information depends on the browser. Most browsers store information for a year.

5. Simplify the Homepage

Your website’s homepage will give your visitors their first impression of your website. As such, it’s important to make sure that that first impression is a good one.

Many businesses think that loading their websites’ homepages with Flash, widgets, and other elements make them look fancy. It doesn’t. It makes the homepages look gaudy and load very slowly.

If your homepage loads slowly, visitors won’t bother going any further into your website.

For that reason, it’s important to keep your homepage simple. In fact, many professional businesses have only a short message in large text on their homepages.

6. Use Site Monitoring

Not having a fast speed could have nothing to do with your website.

Sometimes servers experience hiccups in their systems. When those issues occur, all of their clients’ websites will experience a slow-down.

Of course, that is only one of many off-site problems that could reduce your site’s speed. For that reason, it’s important to hire a professional site monitoring service.

Professional site monitoring services keep an eye on your site 24/7. They run network tests to ensure it is running efficiently. They also report any issues, including security risks that leave your site open to hackers, to you immediately.

Need Site Monitoring? Contact Us!

At Site Uptime, we make it our business to ensure your site maintains a fast speed. We offer around-the-clock monitoring and other services to make sure your site gets the results you want.

For more information, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!