4 Easy Ways to Improve Your Site’s Speed

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Having a fast loading site is crucial both for retaining your visitors and for higher rankings in Google. Most people browsing on the internet these days simply do not have the patience to wait for a site to load if it takes too much time.Therefore, a fast loading site is vitally important to hold your visitors’ attention so they can get the information that they need and hopefully subscribe to your list or make a purchase.

Getting higher rankings in Google when someone searches for something that your website promotes, is also much easier with a fast loading site, as Google tends to favor sites with fast load speeds. Here are four simple ways you can improve your website’s load time.

1. Optimize Your Images

Images on your website can take up a lot of space which means that they can take a while to load if their file size is too large. A quick way to overcome this is to scale down the size of your images before you upload them to your site. There are many free online services that you can use to scale down your images. Just do a search for ‘image optimizers’ and you’ll find some good resources.

Another way to reduce the size of your images if you’re using WordPress is to use a plugin on your site which compresses your images. One of the best ones we’ve found is EWWW Image Optimizer but there are others as well. Just go to ‘Plugins’ then ‘add new plugin’, search for the image optimizer and install it.

2. Get Rid of Unnecessary Plugins

Every plugin that you install onto your site will need resources to run which can mean a slower site load speed. If your site is loading a little too slow, try disabling your plugins one at a time and checking your load speed each time with a tool like GT Metrix.

If you discover a plugin that is definitely slowing down your site and you don’t really need it, just remove it. If the functionality of the plugin is something that you really do need, try and find a similar one which does not cause your site to slow down.

3. Consider Using Cloud Servers

If you really want super fast load speeds you could consider using a cloud hosting service. Cloud servers are basically a system of different servers in different locations which are linked through the cloud. This means that different aspects of your website will be hosted on different servers and can be accessed simultaneously when someone visits your site.

Which a normal shared or dedicated hosting arrangement, your entire website is hosted on the one server which can cause your site to load slower as every element has to be loaded one at a time. With a cloud server, however, things like images for example, will be stored on a different server so everything on your site loads at the same time or in parallel.

4. Enable Browser Caching

Browser caching allows anyone who visits your site to store copies on whichever browser they are using. This means that the next time they visit your site, any content that hasn’t changed can be loaded from their cache rather than reloaded in its entirety from your hosting server.

One of the easiest ways to enable browser caching on your site is to use a plugin like W3 Total Cache on your WordPress site. If you’re not using WordPress, you can ask your web developer to add browser caching to your site.

These easy methods for decreasing your site load time can be implemented quickly and simply and will improve your website’s performance considerably. Therefore, your visitors will stay longer and your site will rank much better in the search engines.

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