Make your website load faster

Have you ever been frustrated by a website that takes eternity to load? Let’s consider this scenario: You are in the middle of a research. You need to quickly fill in some information for the presentation you have.

You fire up your computer, click on Google and type in your keyword phrase. Ten website results are returned to you on a single page. You click the first position and wait for over five minutes for it to load.

Wait! Did I say wait? No. You watch it for some few seconds, hit the return button on your browser and click the next result. That precisely is what people do when they go on the Internet and visit a web page.

With the amount of information readily available on the Internet, website speed becomes a very important factor. The faster your website loads, the more people that visit your webpage. The slower your website loads, the more traffic you lose to your competitors.

Even the search engine giant, Google, will display a website with lower page speed load time than one that takes longer to load.

Your website speed is part of the performance metric that you should measure and pay particular attention to every time. This becomes more important as people access websites from different devices and use different Internet connections.

How can you improve upon your website speed?

Optimise your images

Images on your website are one of the most important reasons why your website may take a longer time to load. Except if you are in the entertainment industry, it is advisable to reduce the amount of images on your website. While having images adds beauty to your website, you should try to reduce their usage. Your home page might have all the images necessary to attract your web visitors, but as users drill down into your web pages, they want information and not aesthetics. Therefore, having only one or two optimised images to boost your website ranking is good enough.

Responsive web design

Billions of searches are done on a daily basis and most of these searches are from mobile devices and tablets. Mobile devices and tablets will display websites that are compatible with mobile browsers. The argument then is: Should you go with developing a separate version of your website for mobile devices popularly known as mobile apps and a separate version for desktops? The choice is yours, but having two separate versions of your website means you pay more to your application developers and the cost of maintenance doubles.

If you also have to make an update, you have to come up with two different versions of your update. However, you can avoid all of these issues by having a responsive website design — RWD. An RWD will ensure that your website displays the same way, no matter what device it is accessed from.

Latest technology

Is your website up to date? Did you design your website in 2002? Technology changes very fast, and so also do the browsers that bring your website to your clients. Upgrading your website to use the latest trend might make a big difference in how long it takes it to load.

Page content

When it comes to page content, lot of confusion arises. Do we cram all our information into the page or separate them? Remember, on the Internet, things are markedly different from offline situations. People’s attention span is very short and there are lots of other resources they can use to get the same type of information. You therefore want to keep your web visitors on your website as long as possible for them to take the actions you want.

Therefore on the web, less is more. If possible, once your webpage contents reach above 1,000 word count, you might start thinking of creating additional pages. Also, if you have less than 300 words on a webpage, you should start thinking of adding more to it. This is because Google will see the webpage as too “lean” and therefore may remove it from its SERP.

Separate scripts

Another factor that can actually slow down your webpage is the amount of information it needs to load before it displays the information necessary for that particular page. HTMl, CSS, JavaScript and Server Scripts are sometimes necessary part of your Webpage.

And all these needs to be loaded to display your website very well and load the applications on your website. They may add to the time it takes before the website loads, thus reducing your web speed.

Calling your scripts from external sources ensures that only the relevant and important ones are called up whenever they are needed and this ensures that your webpage loads faster.

By making these adjustments to your website, you can create a great experience for your users and it might mean the difference between that customer calling you or calling your competitor. So, take a free test today: Use either the Google Speed test tools or try Pingdom.

by Akeem Baiyewu (akeem@akeem.net @acmakeem