Ronak Kothari is the founder of RONKOT, a full-service digital marketing agency.
Regardless of the purpose of your website, users want to see your content as fast as possible. Long load times and broken site components are what drive most potential customers away. Website speed optimization is all a matter of knowing what to look for and how to fix the issues that are causing site slowdown. Not sure where to start? Here are five quick tips for improving website speeds through site optimization.
1. Take Advantage of a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If you aren’t using a CDN yet, start doing your homework and implementing them on your site now. What’s a CDN? In short, it’s a set of distributed web servers in different geographical locations fine-tuned to provide web content to users using their location data.
Single server hosting receives all requests on the same hardware, increasing request time exponentially. Add to that the delay of accessing servers in a distant geographical location, and you have the perfect storm of speed bumps for your website speed. A CDN responds to user requests from the closest server to reduce load times and present content significantly faster than traditional hosting.
2. Optimize Image Size
High resolution, relevant images that catch the eye are critical to conversion and SEO. If you want those images to load before potential customers lose interest and move on, you need to make sure they load quickly.
The best way to get images to load faster is to optimize the image size via image compression tools. You don’t have to compromise on quality to speed up load times.
3. Use a Web App to Compress Files and Reduce Server Requests
Images aren’t the only files that need to be compressed for website speed optimization. Minimizing file size limits HTTP requests and can drastically reduce server response time. Apps like Gzip can compress files before sending them to the browser, transferring information more quickly and presenting it onsite faster than uncompressed files. It’s definitely one of the best options for increasing site speed without implementing significant changes to your site.
4. Cut Back on Redirects
Every redirect cuts into load time. Find all the redirects on your site, eliminate redundancies and then run a scan again. The more redirects you have, the slower your site will be.
5. Prefetching Techniques Are Your Friend
Configuring your site to read and execute user instructions before they actually enter commands can dramatically improve your site speed. Loading pre-determined links and content that most users access when visiting your site is the most common method of implementing prefetching. However, it may be worthwhile to do a deep dive of user behavior data on your site to refine your pre-fetch selection. If you found these tips useful, our team at Ronkot Design has many more methods for boosting your website speed and optimizing your content.Contact us today to learn more.
Ronak Kothari is the founder of RONKOT, a full-service digital marketing agency.