Imagine your prospective customer, pressed for time and searching for a solution you offer. They find several good options on Google, with yours at the top. Excited, they click on your link, but then… your website takes forever to load. As the page continues loading, frustration sets in, and they abandon your site, returning to the search results to find a quicker alternative.

This revision shortens the sentences and removes some passive voice while maintaining the message.

Ohh.. you lost a customer!

Well, you may assume it to be not that worthy but then, you lost, and that’s the reality.

Despite your website being optimized to rank at the top of search engine results and having a creative design, it can still lose its appeal due to one crucial factor: slow loading speed.

Often, we focus too much on elements like design and overlook the importance of website speed, which impacts the user experience right from the start.

No matter how much effort you put into your website, if its loading speed isn’t optimized, all your hard work may be in vain.

Website speed is critical! A slow-loading website can lead to higher bounce rates and abandoned visitors, which, in turn, may affect your search engine ranking. The worst part? Once visitors leave, they’re unlikely to return.

Heavy Bounce Rates Cause Heavy Losses

Get your website speed assessment test done time to time. Lower gets your website speed, the higher get its bounce rate. The higher go the bounce rate, the lower become the conversion rate. Therefore, it is important to get the website speed optimization done.

According to a study conducted on neural network containing massive bounce rate and conversions data, it was found that as the page load time goes up on a scale of one second to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce rate increases by 123%.

Source: Think with Google

There may be many culprit factors for this, like the number of content elements, such as text and images, which when goes up, drops the conversion rate drastically.

According to the latest statistics about website load speed, collected from some 5000 websites, it is concluded that publishers have been finding it really challenging to get high page speed, with average score being 44, which is labelled as ‘poor’ by search engines.

Source: Ezoic.com

Slow Website! What Can be the Reasons?

Here’s a revised version to improve clarity, reduce passive voice, and address sentence structure:

Several factors can contribute to poor website load times, such as under-optimized images, excessive HTTP requests, messy coding, JavaScript issues, too many ads, poor web hosting, lack of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching issues, large media files, heavy plugins, and more.

This highlights the importance of careful attention from website owners and developers to ensure their site stays competitive, especially on search engines like Google.

So, the key questions are:

• How can you optimize website speed?
• How do you measure website speed?
• How can you increase website speed?

These questions can be answered with six simple tips that can significantly boost your website’s speed and enhance both user experience and performance.

1. Go with Smart Hosting on a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

CDN, the wide network of servers significantly reduces the distance between server and the user, and therefore minimizes the delays in web page load speed.

A great amount of bandwidth is saved when the media files are hosted on CDN. This minimizes the load on a single server, leading to quick load time. Not only this, even the probability of Distributed Denial-of-Serve (DDoS) attacks is also minimized owing to the reduced traffic.

You can also reduce the size of your files by compressing them with Gzip, a file format that locates and replaces strings of code in the text files, to shorten them. So make your website Gzip enabled.

2. Reduce the Number of HTTP requests

HTTP requests refer to the download requests for every component of a webpage. These requests are generated for each element of the content, whether it’s an image, plugin, ad, or any other component. Each request must be fulfilled for the webpage to load completely. The more components there are, the longer the load time.

To reduce load time, focus on minimizing the number of components. Start by identifying and removing unnecessary elements. While this may seem challenging at first, as every component may appear essential, it’s a key step to improving speed.

You can also merge files to reduce the number of requests. Ensure that your code is clean and optimized by eliminating unnecessary indentations, spaces, or other redundant elements that can make the code messy.

3. Enable Caching in Browser

4. Bring Down the Size of Images

Heavy websites loaded with big size images is the most common reason behind low website speed. Of course, the images ought to be in good number entice and engage the users, yet they may hamper the website performance by making it bulky enough to load quickly.

No, you don’t have to remove them completely. They are the soul of the webpage design, especially of an eCommerce website, how can you?

Unless an eCommerce website has ample images to display the product, it cannot convince the potential buyers. Do you know, about 65% of consumers have expressed their desire to see minimum three pictures of the product, so that they can think about making the purchase.

So, you just can’t do away with deleting the images. Better you compress them to reduce their size. This can be done either by cropping the images or by using various tools. If it is a WordPress website, then WP Smush can be a wonderful tool for contracting the image size. Well, for rest of the websites, Compressor.io can quite be good one.

In a study, it was reported that by minimizing the sizes of images from 22MB to 300KB, the waiting time for the user was reduced by 70%!

Know about: How Far Does Website Design Matter

5. Unplug Too Many Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins play a massive role by adding functionality to a WordPress website for a great user experience.

Simply take a note of all the plugins that have turned out to be obsolete and badly configured, and deleting them, and yo, you’re done!

Plugin performance can be evaluated in many ways.

6. Cut Down the Number of Redirects

A dynamic website undergoes changes at a constant level. Many of its pages are moved or deleted, obviously giving rise to redirects which save the website from broken links. But too many of them may lower the website speed and performance, as they create more HTTP requests needed to be met during the load time.

So, to improve the speed, minimize the number of redirects as many as you can, obviously on the basis of their individual relevance.

Finding the website speed such a crucial factor for defining conversion rate, more and more companies are opting for website speed and performance optimization service.

On Concluding Notes

Improving your website speed and overall performance can be challenging. Many factors need to be considered, and they take time to address.

This version reduces passive voice, shortens sentences, and varies sentence structure to improve readability.

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