53% of mobile website users will leave a webpage that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So, if your website is slow to load, you’re likely missing out on a lot of visitors and maybe even revenue.
Fortunately, it isn’t that hard to fix a slow loading website.
Keep reading and you’ll learn what it takes to dramatically improve the loading speed of your website, even if you’ve never done this kind of thing before. When you’re done, you’ll know so much about improving website loading times, you’ll be ready to write a book on the topic.
Let’s begin!
Check Your Hosting Situation
As you will see in this post, there are many things that can impact the loading speed of a website. But perhaps the most significant factor is the hosting setup you have. That’s because the way your website is hosted can have a large impact on how fast your website loads.
If your website is loading slowly, it is not just a matter of switching hosts. You need to seek out a specific kind of hosting setup, that will ensure high speeds.
The first thing you need to do is find a host that has servers located in the region of your visitors. When your website servers are close to the location of your visitors, it reduces the amount of distance data has to travel.
This naturally improves the amount of time it takes for the website to load. You also want to make sure you have a hosting plan that provides dedicated hosting. With a dedicated hosting plan, you are going to be in charge of your own server.
This is opposed to something known as a shared hosting plan. With that kind of plan, your website will be on a server alongside other websites. This is a problem because the server can only support so much bandwidth. As a result, if the other websites are experiencing high levels of traffic, it can harm the loading speed of your website.
With a dedicated hosting plan, though, you will not run into this problem as you are the only one using your server. A dedicated hosting plan is going to cost you more money. But when you consider the benefits of a faster loading website, spending this extra money can be worth every penny.
Learn What Makes Your Website Slow to Load
Once your hosting situation is sorted out, you need to spend some time trying to work out what is causing your website to load slowly.
You can do this with the help of a tool known as the Page Insights tool. This is a specialist tool provided by Google, which helps you judge the speed of your website. This tool will also tell you what needs to be done to improve the speed of your site.
Some of the suggestions provided by this tool can be quite technical, as they may include making changes to the ‘code’ of your website.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you run the risk of wrecking your website by making these changes. Because of this, you might want to look into hiring an expert web developer to help you make these changes. You should be able to find someone by searching for a freelancer online.
Some of the suggestions tend to be quite easy to act on. For instance, a common suggestion is to reduce the size of the images on your website. Odds are you have a WordPress website. If this is the case, you can install a plugin to help you reduce image sizes.
It’s worth mentioning that you should always make a backup of your site before you make any adjustments. If you do this it will be easy to revert your site to its previous state, should anything go wrong.
Once you have made changes to your site, be sure to use the Page Insights tool again. Doing so will let you know how effective your changes are and if there is anything else left to do.
Review Your Theme
In some cases, you will find that no matter how many changes you make to your website or hosting situation, your website still loads slowly. This can happen if your theme is not efficient.
If you are using an old theme on your website, you will often find that changing your theme can help improve the speed of your website. Choosing a new theme can be challenging. You will need to find a theme that balances speed with an appealing design. You’ll tend to find that a straightforward theme, like the one on this website, generally works best.
Sometimes, you might see a theme that loads quickly but does not look as good as you’d like it to. If that is the case, you can hire someone to help you adjust the design of the theme. Such an individual will be able to customize the theme so that it looks just the way you want it to.
Test on Multiple Devices
It is a good idea to test the speed of your site on multiple devices. This will ensure you are not alienating a certain kind of user base.
Try to see how fast your website loads on a pc and laptop. You should also see how fast your website loads on a tablet and mobile device. If you can, think about testing your site on different mobile operating systems too.
Fantastically Fast Websites?
People don’t like to wait around. If your website loads slowly, people are just going to click the back button and go somewhere else.
In this post, we’ve taken a look at some of the things you can do to improve things if your website is a bit sluggish. You need to review the kind of hosting plan you have for your site. You also need to learn what makes your website slow to load, so you can address the problems causing issues.
Testing your website on many devices is also a good idea. Doing so will let you know what kind of speeds everyone is experiencing. Taking this approach, also makes it easier to spot issues that might have gone otherwise unnoticed.
Do you own an e-commerce site? Check out this blog post to learn how you can improve the security of your store.
