Your Web Page Needs to Load Fast

Now, more than ever, it is essential for your website to be super quick. Before, it was just a matter of people’s preference and their impatience. Now, if your web page loads slowly, you can be penalized in Google Search for it, and no one wants that. That’s quite a slap on the hand for not keeping things neat and tidy. Fear not, because I have a few tips to help you optimize your website so it loads lickety split.

Compress those images!

This is so much easier to do than ever before. Even if you create a lightweight image in Photoshop or some other graphics editor, you can use a handful of different online tools to optimize them even further. I use Compress Jpeg for all of my images. Don’t let the name fool you. Not only can you compress jpeg images, but you can even compress PNG files and PDFs, too. You can upload multiple files at once and download them all in a pack. Just make sure you upload images of all the same kind. In other words, keep your PNGs together and your Jpegs together.

Use Caching

For those of you that don’t know, like the average business owner reading this post, caching is where your browser doesn’t fully reload each image each time. The initial load might be a little longer, but later visits will see an improvement in performance. You can also do object cache and varnish cache, which highly optimizes everything. This is super important. If you don’t know how to do this, hire me, and I can take care of it for you fairly quickly.

Load Javascript in the Footer of your site

This doesn’t effect whether or not your script works, it just puts all of your scripts at the end of the sequence for page loading. This makes it so that the content of your site loads much faster. Your visitors get content to look at and browse through while your scripts finish loading.

Minimize Javascript and CSS

This is usually handled by a plugin. Here’s the thing: this can require regular maintenance and manual review periodically. The reason is that I have seen plugins update, or the cache fail to periodically flush, causing issues on websites. When you make changes to your website, you’ll want to turn all caching plugins off. You can turn them on again when you’re done editing.

Don’t go cheap on web hosting

That would be like buying a sports car and buying a V6, expecting it to go fast. It might be quick, but the extra horsepower is going to make a considerable difference. I prefer cloud hosting, simply because it runs much faster than traditional servers and tends to be more secure. I provide web hosting and maintenance plans for my clients, for a hands off experience.

Don’t load a bunch of Ads on your site

I know you might want to monetize your traffic even further with some Google ads, but I have found they increase the load time on your site. It’s a trade off. Either you want to make money on your traffic at the sacrifice of performance, which can eventually impact your rankings, or you can have better performance and monetize your traffic with more long-term marketing tactics.

Trim the social share buttons

Depending on what you’re using to promote social sharing, you can increase web page load times significantly, due to the javascript that some social sharing buttons use to get the job done. Be selective and look for lightweight social sharing buttons. Only use them on pages of content people may actually share.

What’s most important is to make your web page as quick to load as possible. Keep what you need and trim what you don’t. The faster it is, the better and more higher it is likely to rank in search engines, especially if you do your on-page SEO correctly. Get some traffic to the page, and you’ll be well on your way.

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