You all know nothing is more frustrating than a slower loading website. This is not only bad for a user but this affects the business very seriously. Speed can create or break a website. It changes your traffic, page views, conversions, sales and your overall fame. By making it faster, you can improve your business or your fan base and help it grow. A lot of online tools are available to test the speed of your website.
Your website speed is very important for SEO also. It will directly affect your Google page rank. This is because Google prefers fast websites, and it rewards them by ranking them higher in search engine results. Let’s see what all are the reason for a slow loading website.
- Complex Codings
- Images that are not optimized
- Poor hosting Plans
- Unwanted Plugins
These are the main factors that slow down your website. So first you should fix the errors in your site to speed up. By making a common audit on your website you can easily find out the errors and can correct them. Now, let’s check how to overcome these issues.
1. Upgrade your Hosting Plan
Your Hosting Provider holds the most important factor of your website speed. No doubt poor hosting plans will slow down your site. Never ever go for cheap hosting plans. If you have shared hosting, you should either move to a VPS or dedicated option. Either way, you will notice a significant difference in your website speed. If you are using a dedicated server and still experiencing the problem then upgrade your plan according to your traffic. On the other hand, with dedicated servers, you get full control, since you get dedicated resources. You don’t have to share RAM, CPU, bandwidth or anything else since all of the resources are dedicated only to you.
2. Enable the cache
Enabling the cache gives you a better user experience. A cache stores the static files, such as HTML documents, media files, images, CSS and JavaScript files, for easier and faster access. Enabling full cache will reduce the page load time to 2.4 to 0.9 seconds. Depending on the platform you are using you can enable the cache in different methods. In WordPress, you can enable it by Plugins. The best WordPress caching plugins are W3 Total Cache, which is the most popular performance plugin, and WP Super Cache, which is best for websites with high traffic and underpowered servers.
3. Optimize the images
Large size images are always hard to load. Optimize all the images according to your platform. Consider reducing the size of your images without negatively affecting their quality. You can accomplish this by using a plugin that can compress your images and ensure they don’t lose quality in the process. If you use WordPress, try WP Smush, a plugin that will automatically compress your images the moment you upload them to your media library.
4. Complex Codings
Always choose simple coding on the website. You should simplify the coding otherwise it will take a long time to load.
5. Plugins
Every plugin requires some resources to run. You can easily identify which plugins are slowing down your website by selectively disabling them and then measuring server performance. If you‘re using WordPress as your CMS, for instance, you can install the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin, which is the best and most useful diagnostic plugin available.
