You can spend as much money on marketing your online business as you like. But, the simple fact remains that if your website is slow, people aren’t going to hang around for long enough to see what you have on offer.
In today’s guide, we’re going to go through some of the simple steps you can take to ensure your website is running fast. Let’s get started right away:
Check it.
The first thing to do is to check how fast your website is running. There are plenty of resources out there that can help, and many are available for free. Check out GTMetrix to get started.
They will give you a list of everything that is wrong with your site and give it a grade. Just follow their instructions to start making improvements. Don’t forget, you have less than a couple of seconds to make a great first impression, so the higher your score on a service like this, the better. Make your changes, and you should see an improvement in your website performance.
Watch your images.
One of the biggest culprits for slow website loading is your pictures. Let’s say that you have uploaded a whole bunch of images direct from your top-of-the-range camera, and everything looks great. The trouble is, it takes 10-12 seconds for everything to load – on a good day. The reasons are simple – your image files are too large. You need to optimize them for the web, to ensure they load quickly. Use editing software to do this – Photoshop will do the job. You could also try a free alternative such as gimp.org. You will make your images a lot smaller regarding file size, but they will still look sharp enough to appeal to the eye.
Switch your web host.
Another significant problem that can be solved easily is to do with your web host. If you are on a free package or use a shared server, there will be times of the day when your website runs slowly. No matter what you do to improve things, your web host can strangle the amount of traffic you get and slow things down to allow for their other customers. You could be sharing your online space with hundreds of other companies at the same time, so it’s vital that you seek out a dedicated space. Head over to makeawebsitehub.com for a comparison of web hosts and the type of services you can expect. It could make an enormous difference to your website’s performance.
Check your coding.
The cleaner your code, the easier it is for other systems to read it. So, let’s say you have built your website from the ground up and things are a bit of a mess regarding your coding. It makes sense that it will take longer for those systems to read and interpret. It’s worth speaking to a professional designer to come in and start from scratch. It might be a big job, but it will be worth it in the end.
Hope this has helped – good luck and godspeed!
