Give Your Website Speed Some TLC

No matter how beautiful your website layout is, how “on brand” it is or how many bells and whistles it boasts, if the loading time is slow customers simply won’t be sticking around. Improving the speed of your website is not only critical to the user experience, it also gives you a major assist in search engine optimization efforts.

Tips for improving the overall speed of your website:

Optimize image size and type

If your website is host to numerous image files, it’s important to make sure they’re not larger than they need to be. The human eye can only process so many colors, whereas the image uploaded may contain millions more colored pixels than what you can see. Image compression can remove those pixels you don’t see, without a noticeable difference, thereby reducing the file size dramatically. Compressing your website’s images helps to save bandwidth and improves your site’s overall performance.
In addition to size, the type of image file also matters. Want Google to read your images faster and more easily? Try .webp files, which allow for smaller, yet richer images.

Clean up your code

Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup in your web pages and script files. This includes removing spaces, comments, line breaks and grouping similar code together to minify all HTML, CSS and Javascript code. Minification drastically improves site speed and accessibility, which in turn greatly enhances the user experience.

Cache your site

When a customer visits your website, their browser stores images and styles, allowing it to load faster the next time they visit. Each visit will result in fewer resources required from your website host or server to load the site. While this is a great feature for any site, all of those “remembered details” can start to bog down the speed time over time. To avoid that, website cache needs to be manually set for most sites or hosts, and should be cleared from time to time when new or fresh content is introduced.

Hosting

Choosing the right host for your platform makes all the difference in the user experience. Ensure your host dominantly supports the website platform you are using, however basic or advanced, as they optimize their servers and processes to serve those platforms best. For example, many hosts are one-size-fits-all. While they will allow for many different platforms on their servers, they don’t often specialize in one over another. Your WordPress website may not run as fast or as securely as it could on a host that specifically serves WordPress customers. Make sure you know how your hosting interacts with your website platform. (Psst: Drop us a note if you’d like our complimentary advice!)

Hire the right team

OK, this might seem like a shameless plug, but hear us out. Similar to how website hosting services are never really one size fits all, neither are digital marketing companies. A solid digital marketing strategy should point efforts back to your website — making sure it is fully optimized for search engine optimization, user experience and ultimately, lead generation.

Connect with us for a complimentary website review today!