Top 15 Tips to Speed Up Your Website and Improve Conversion
Want to find out the ways to speeding up your website and improve conversion? As a professional web developer and CEO of VOCSO I will be showing you how you can speed up your website/blog and to improve its conversion rate. If You don’t have a fast website or your website is not able to delight your customers on all searchable devices with its speed? Follow my effective tips on website speed up that will help your website to load faster and reduce the percentage of bounce rate.
Firstly, the website is a collection of various and related web pages which entails multimedia contents, which is specifically identified with a unified domain name, and published on web servers. Generally, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load its contents, consumers get pissed-off and this could result in the loss of consumer or a website visitor. According to a website’s survey, it was ascertained that 79% (percentage) of the visitors will not come back to the site also 40% (percentage) of them will immediately abandon a Goddamn slowing website and this will be a huge setback for the website conversion.
Why speed is important
In the same survey that was discussed earlier, 52% of customers/shoppers said a quick website page loading is very much necessary to their site’s loyalty and also 44% said they report the poor performance of the site to their friends. By doing this, friends and families will always ignore the website.
In the year 2006, Amazon Company said (reported) for every all 100 milliseconds it speeds up its website, they always get a 1% increase in sales (revenue). Then Google.com announced that in the effort to the argument/improve the webpage (Amazon), that speed of the page was a consideration in the way they rank any search results.
Since then, there has been no case of shortage and this study shows the benefits of securing a super-fast website.
Your site’s speed loading is very important to improve its conversion on any device like a computer and mobile phone. The website will be accessed on both of the devices to test its speed.
The survey further showed that a one second delay of a page either on the laptop or mobile phone can decrease the customer satisfaction by about- 16%. Improving a site’s speed improves its performance.
To speed-up your website and increase its conversion, Here are my guides on speeding up a website on the right path:
1. Use content delivery network:
(Left) Single server distribution | (Right) CDN scheme of distribution
Image Source: delivery network – Wikipedia
To host your media data on a content delivery network is a good way to speed up your website and increase its conversion, this might save at least 60% bandwidth & halve the number of requests your site made. An important way to speed up (enhance) a website is to implement the use of a content delivery network. As this is the network that holds your content so that whenever you make a request, the request is served to form the closest server.
2. Use WP Engine
To change your web hosts cannot be a thing to do under 45 minutes, but it has the opportunity to have a huge impact than all of the tweaks below. My advice is If you are using a mediocre or low-quality web hosting company, start with a host wp engine. Using WordPress engine for your website will have a significant impact concerning your website speed because of all the plugins that will greatly optimize the website and enhance conversion.
3. Using a caching plugin
When it comes to optimizing your web page, the quickest and smartest way is to load a very good cache plugin. Using some of this caching plugins will enhance the web page to load the static content like; CSS, JavaScript files, and images. One of the quickest ways to cut a page loading speed is to install a good caching plugin like the W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Mind you, all these plugins must be kept updated meaning that, they were to be updated whenever the newer version is available.
4. Using a good theme
Prevention is better than cure they say. To prevent a lot of issues on page speed-up in the first place, we would opt for a good host company, a good and reliable CDN (Content delivery networks), and good design or theme. If a good theme is been used appropriately, it will enhance the webpage speed and yield a good conversion rate.
5. Compress your images and media with WP Smush.it
Large images can be a real drag for a website. If we are to use WordPress, we will have to install the WordPress Smush.it plugin to automatically reduce and compress all your images, this plugin will automatically reduce the size of your images without losing any of visual qualities. There also some very good site that reduces images for free online. Specifying all the image dimensions also will definitely save the browser having to go through a rigorous process to load a page; hence, it helps in speeding up the website.
6. Compressing your website
A modern is essential and needed to enjoy modern web content and modern web pages. Gzip is one of the simple ways to compress your website’s files and this will save a lot of bandwidth and actually speed up page loading times. If a file is requested in a page, the loading time of the website is determined by the bandwidth and if is strong and the website is already compressed, the page will be loaded fast enough. With this, the conversion rate of the site will be maximized.
7. Fixing your entire website’s broken links
Broken links are stumbling blocks for bandwidth. Fixing your broken links will also speed up your websites and increase the conversion. A periodic check should always be performed on the entire site so as to monitor the speed. One of the greatest tools for this is Google analytics where you can set your evaluation period for the amount of the time you want to check. After getting the whole result from all the periods you now compare and see any broken links that are slowing down the website.
8. Minifying your JS and CSS files
One of the downfalls of WordPress and other contents management systems is the new CSS and JS files which is added every time we install a new plugin.
It will squish all of your files into one, so instead of the call often individual JavaScript files, we simply place all of JavaScript in one file. This will automatically speed up the website and yield a good conversation because it can reduce the numbers of CSS and JavaScript files that need to be downloaded. Simply put, multiple CSS file and JavaScript filed will be combined into a single CSS and JavaScript respectively.
9. Replacing the PHP with a static HTML where possible
PHP is very good for making your site work efficiently and reducing the need for entering the same pieces of information in multiple times. Meanwhile, by calling information through the PHP uses up server’s resource and this should be replaced with a static HTML.
10. Turning off the trackbacks and pingbacks
Trackbacks and pingbacks were originally introduced as a way for blogs to notify each other as a link. WordPress has made it possible to turn this feature off. Trackbacks and pingbacks do not really serve any use in WordPress, and yet they were often enabled by the default. We will turn both of these off because they do clog up the database and increases the number of requests.
11. Putting CSS at the top and JS at the bellow
It is considered the best way to put the CSS as close to the top of the page as possible, as browsers will not render your pages before it renders the CSS file. JavaScript, on the other hand, could be close to the bottom; this will prevent browsers from parsing. A user will be stuck viewing a white blank page if there is a mistake
12. Disabling all hotlinkings of images
This is to prevent any other websites from hogging your own bandwidth, You will need to add some snippet of code to your .htaccess file by doing this, whenever anyone tries to get or fetch any photo on your site, he will only see replacement which we have to provide on another domain.
13. Switching off all the plugins that are not in use
Plugins usually slow the site down. So, disabling all the non-functioning plugin will increase the speed and maximize the conversion. Plugins that are not in use but still active on the CP slows the web page down, clearing all idles and old plugins will free up the website and enhance its performance.
14. Minimizing all the round trip times RTTs
Rounding trip time is a time taken for any client to send any request and the server’s response.
It will help to reduce the numbers of unnecessary requisition and this will reduce the RTTs. By doing this you will be able to reduce the number of round trip by implementing a parallel get rid of any excess weight on the web page, it can also reduce the round time by moving your location more closer to the user.
15. Using a CSS Sprites
A sprite is a big image which comprises all of your images. They are very similar to the sticker sets we used to get with 100 stickers in a single sheet. Using the CSS, we could hide everything in that image except for the section between a set of coordinates.
A user would not have to wait until individual images to finish loading, immediately the main page load all other images in the sprite, load time is reduced as the browser will have to fetch less things, in this situation, the website will be optimized and will have a good conversion
In conclusion, with the above tips of website speedup will surely help your business website speed it up and increase it conversion rate significantly.
