Faster Websites Get More Business – Quick Tips
What do you do when you come across a slow loading website? Get frustrated, click the BACK button and visit other faster websites, right? Your prospects are also doing the same on your site.
A fast web site is very important in today’s world as people are getting more and more restless. Google has openly declared that it is rewarding faster websites with improved ranking. Users also stay longer on fast loading sites and this increases the chances that they will see more pages and hopefully, more of them will submit a quote request or buy stuff.
There are several ways to get your web site to load faster. Most of these are highly technical in nature. However, I will give you the ideas in a more friendly language.
You can apply these tips yourself or ask us to make your sites faster for a small fee and enjoy the new business. You can get even better results with our 3S services covering speed, security and SEO.
Get a faster web host
One of the key factors in your site being slow is a weak web hosting company. The company may have an under-rated server and loaded several domains on the same server putting it under stress. You might need to invest a little more but it is important to work with a good, business class hosting company.
Improve the page design
If your site uses lots of Javascript and CSS files, it will be slow. These files take time to be downloaded and understood by the browsers like Chrome, Firefox etc. You need to reduce the number of such files and optimise where possible.
Image files
Many designers upload large image files, generally shot on a high resolution camera. These large files are not needed on the computer or mobile of the users. Reducing the image dimension (pixels) can improve the file size. We can also reduce the resolution of the image to make it smaller without compromising the visual quality. These 2 techniques can be combined to make the image file size much smaller, thereby making it download faster and show up quicker.
Technical Adjustments
There are several other technical adjustments like pre-connecting to some 3rd party servers, e.g., Google Analytics, reordering file sequence etc that be applied to make the site load faster.
We have improved the loading speed for several sites and have seen a tangible improvement in the rankings as well as response rate. One site’s home page which loaded in 9 secs before optimisation now loads in 4.6 secs. This type of improvement become even more important when the user access your site through a mobile phone because these are generally less powerful than a desktop.
If you want a free assessment of your web site’s speed improvement potential, contact us here and we will send you a no-obligation proposal within 2 business days (generally much sooner).