Last Updated on September 23, 2020 by Timothy Ephraim
Having a slow-loading website is irritating for both your website visitors and search engine. Your users will leave and your search engine ranking will go down, all of these happens due to a slow-loading website. So you should consider fixing it if your website loads slow.
So it is essential to speed up your website to provide better page load time for both your visitors and Search engines.
Here in this article, we give you some tips to speed up your website.
Choose a reputed hosting provider
Yes, that’s the first thing you should consider. While choosing a web hosting provider, you should take performance into consideration. You will be spending between $90-$150/year if you are on shared hosting and even more if you are on a VPS.
There are many shared web hosting providers and it could make you confused. Testing each web hosting provider may not be practical most us( Though I think its the right way to understand about a hosting provider).
So its good to do your research before purchasing a hosting plan. Now, if you are someone who is thinking of making a website or if you are someone who is fed up of a slow loading website and needs a faster web host, check out Siteground(Read Review), our most favourite hosting provider which offers fast, secure servers with awesome support.
Use a cache plugin
Using a cache plugin can dramatically increase your website loading speed. There are so many plugins available for this purpose you should choose a plugin which suits your needs and your platform.
A cache plugin can reduce the number of request to the server by saving static content suggest images, JavaScript, CSS in the cache memory. So that they can deliver these files from cache much faster.
Optimise images
Optimising images can help you to increase your website speed considerably. If images are optimised, they will be downloaded quickly and the webpage will be rendered faster and thereby give faster website loading speed.
There are various image Optimisation plugins available and you can choose one according to your needs and your budget. Some plugins you give better Optimisation so please do compare them before choosing one.
Enable gzip compression
Enabling gzip compression can make your website faster. If your website resources are compressed before transferring from the server Cheetah client’s Browser it will load much more faster than usual.
This will be helpful to increase your website’s or blog’s speed considerably.
Use a CDN
Using a CDN can help you to speed up the website.CDNs are spread across the world and it stores your website data in a data centre closer to your customer.
Any customer visits your website, Static contents such as images CSS JavaScript are delivered from the CDN which makes your website load faster.
Using a CDN will help you to increase your website loading time and it’s also useful to reduce the time for the first byte which is crucial for SEO as well.
If you use WordPress, consider upgrading to a managed WordPress hosting provider as most of them provide free CDN with their packages free of cost. Additionally, you can activate the Jetpack content delivery system to deliver your static assets such as images from their servers which will help you to increase the speed of your website.
Read Our list of best CDNs.
Minify JavaScript and CSS
Combining and minifying JavaScript and CSS can be helpful to deliver faster website loading time. You can do it yourself if you know what you are doing. If you are not an expert, I would suggest you use a Caching plugin which offers CSS and JS minification and combining.
Fewer HTTP requests and redirects
You should consider making fewer HTTP requests to the server. Fewer requests mean faster loading websites. There are many things you can do to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Removing unused plugins could help you to reduce the number of HTTP requests. Also, if you stop using Comments and Gravatar, it could help to reduce the number of HTTP requests, combining CSS and JS can also help to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Redirects can be a culprit too. If your website redirects multiple times, That can be problematic. Website direction takes time (Every millisecond counts). If your website redirects multiple time, it is bad, really bad.
Enable browser caching
Enabling Browser caching could help to make a website load faster. When someone visits your website contents are being saved in the web browser.
So if someone visits again they don’t need to download the same content again this will increase website loading speed as your web browser don’t need to download the same content again from the server as it can be retrieved from the cache.
Change your web host
If you have tried everything listed here and your website is still slow, you should probably consider changing your web hosting provider. Probably slowly responding server could be a reason why your website is slow. In this case, your only option is to switch to a reputed web host which offers faster page loading.
We recommend Siteground and Interserver as they are two of the best hosting providers. Read our Siteground Review here and Interserver review here.
Conclusion
These are a few of the available options to optimize your website for speed. One point I missioned intentionally is, code quality. The reason for this is, most websites now use a CMS which comes with good code quality so it doesn’t need a mention here(I think so).
If you follow steps above and your website is still loading slow, you should probably change your web host. Alternatively, it is wise to conduct a website audit to find what makes your website slow.