Slow load speeds typically lead to a high bounce rate as your customers don’t want to wait around for your website to load its content.
According to a 2018 study by Pingdom, websites that don’t load within 4 seconds will typically lose up to 24% of users immediately. That’s nearly a quarter of potential customers not even looking at your website due to a slow load speed.
How To Increase your Website Speed
Your website speed is affected by a number of factors. Simply put, the more content that needs to be loaded and the larger the page file size is, the slower the site will load. This is however not the be all and end all to website load speeds.
Keep reading to find out the four best ways to increase load speed and why each is an effective key to a lightning fast website.
Website Hosting Servers
To be frank, if you’re paying $5 per month for hosting and you have a website that is more than one page and that includes more than just text and a few small images, you’re in for a bad time when it comes to load speeds.
Website hosting varies hugely in both pricing and specifications. As a rule of thumb you want at least the following:
- Australian based server
- SSD Storage
- 4gb memory allowance
- Unlimited Bandwidth
High speed hosting is a must. Think about your hosting like a computer. An old, cheap computer will load slowly and be a pain to use. A new computer with the latest technology will load fast and be a joy to use.
Website Caching
We install WordPress caching plugins on all of our websites. A caching plugin in short allows your website to load a lot faster once each page has already been loaded by your user.
Effectively once a user has loaded a page once, the second load will be instant.
Our caching plugins also minify the code on your website allowing your browser to access and read the information stored on your server a lot faster.
Reduced Image Sizes
Large images slow a website down dramatically. Programs such as Photoshop will allow to your compress your image file sizes which will contribute to faster load speeds. Typically images on your website should be no larger than 500kb maximum. We constantly see businesses uploading files as big as 1mb or more slowing their website down to a crawl.
A good website design agency will always ensure images uploaded to the website are an appropriate size.
