If you find that your web server is not as fast and it needs to be, you should think about how to speed it up. Lag times and slow website loading speeds are responsible for reducing your rankings in Google, as well as lost customers and leads.
In this fast-paced internet climate today, you cannot afford this kind of loss as an online business. You should always be conscious of your speed so that you can make changes where they are needed.
The following statistics were recently reported that showed the importance of increasing the speed of your web server in search results.
Stats on Load Time and Bounce Rates
- 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
(Source: Crazyegg.com)
What Can Be Done?
It is important to learn what you can do to increase your speed and performance when it comes to your mobile website so that you will keep your traffic coming in without delay. There are different ways to think about this issue and various tools and methods you can use to improve your speed.
7 Ways to Speed it the Performance of Your Web Server
Below are seven tools and methods that you can use to speed up your web server so that you maximize the overall speed of your site.
Google’s Mobile Site Tester (New)
One tool you can use to find out your mobile website speed is the new Google mobile website tester.
This is a new tool that Google has provided to web owners so that you can test your site to see if it is mobile friendly. It tests the following factors:
- Mobile-friendliness– The first parameter that this tool tests is the mobile-friendliness of your site. This locates any type of issue that your site is having in bringing up your page for mobile devices and includes the responsiveness of your page for mobile devices.
- Mobile speed– The second parameter this tool tests is your mobile speed. It shows you the percentage of speed your site is returning with mobile users and even shows you a visual on the right side of the page to show you how it looks on both mobile and desktop devices.
- Desktop speed– The speed your site is returning for desktop users is also important. Even though the number of mobile users is expected to exceed desktop users in the near future, it is still important to have a fast website for desktop users as well.
Minimize HTTP Requests
Minimizing the amount of work your server has to do in calling up HTTP sites will increase your web server speed. Yahoo reported in a recent study of page load options that HTTP requests account for approximately 80% of the page download time. Decreasing images, Javascripts, and other elements on your page may decrease the time it takes for your page to load.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Tools
In addition to Google’s mobile website speed test mentioned earlier in this post, you can also take advantage of Google’s PageSpeed Tools. These tools are for both desktop and mobile as well and can help you analyze what the problem may be regarding page speeds.
The good thing about Google being in such control of the algorithm changes and updates is that they always provide sophisticated analysis tools that will help you increase your speed. Make sure to take advantage of these tools to increase speed and views.
In addition to Google’ PageSpeed Tools, you can also use these website analyzer tools to check for other areas of optimization and improvement on your site as well.
Enable Compression
Another thing you can do if you want to increase your speed is to increase your compression rate. Bulky websites (sites that have over 100KB of data) are often time-consuming to download. As a rule, the more content you have on your site, the longer it takes to load.
Compression decreases the bandwidth that your page uses, thus resulting in faster load times. You can use a tool such as GZIP Compression to accomplish this.
Enable Caching
You can enable caching that allow your users to save your site in their browser cache. When they do this, the browser remembers your site the next time they come to your site, making your page load much faster.
This article explains four major ways that you can enable caching.
Optimize images
Optimize your images to reduce size and increase the speed that users can access your page. Look at the images on your page. Slow-loading images, graphics, and even your logo may take too long to load on your web server. If you reduce the size of images, you will be much more likely to provide the user with a faster and more effective on-site experience that will make them want to come back again.
When adjusting and optimizing your images to the smaller size, use a cropping tool to lower the file size, rather than using larger images and tweaking the HTML. This allows for much better optimization while keeping the quality of the original image.
Also remember to use JPEG file types primarily, rather than GIFs, as GIFs generally take much longer to load.
Check your code for errors.
One of the problems with slow-loading pages is also your CSS and script errors. Javascript errors often account for many of page load issues as well. CSS (cascading style sheets) are an alternative method to create a page via HTML but if they have errors or duplicate lines of code, it can slow down the load time. It can also produce errors in your copy on your page as well.
Double-checking your code can increase your load time of your server significantly and can provide your user with a much better and more responsive website experience.
Keep All Site Users in Mind (Desktop, Tablet and Mobile)
As we alluded to at the beginning of this post, you must think about how your site is loading for mobile users as well. The significance of this has been clearly outlined in the latest Google algorithm updates that they rolled out on January 10, 2017 (just a few days ago).
They are going to start penalizing site owners more severely for failure to make their sites mobile-friendly and this includes extra penalties for mobile sites that provide pop-up interstitial ads. So clean up your pop-ups and optimize your mobile site for the best traffic results in the near future.
Now is the time to make sure your site in ready for mobile users and that it doesn’t violate Google’s principles of good web design.
We can help by checking your site for mobile-friendliness. Then we can optimize your site using our sophisticated tools and even create a brand new site from scratch for your business that will speed up your web server and produce optimal results.
Contact us at webdesignteam.com and see how we can help you meet the changes of Google’s new 2017 algorithms, as well as impress your most important audience: your customers.
Because you can’t expect people to stay on your site if it takes too long to load. Learn more about how your web design affects page load times at webdesignteam.com then let us know how we can help.