Did you know that more than half of mobile users abandon a website if it fails to load within three seconds?
Whether consuming news or conducting work research, speed is a key component of an enjoyable browsing experience. A slow site can be frustrating for visitors, which can have a negative impact on both SEO and user experience, massively hindering the amount of traffic your website gains.
It turns out that there are several methods you can implement to speed up your website and drive more traffic towards it. Read on as we explain some effective ways of making your website load quickly.
Optimised Hosting
Optimised hosting providers use powerful servers and smart configurations that handle website requests in a quick and reliable fashion. Hardware like SSDs serves pages quickly, and the common use of CDN integration stores copies of the website on several worldwide servers.
Optimised hosting is closely associated with load balancing and auto-scaling, which prevent slowdowns in the event of a traffic spike and make sure websites run smoothly even during high-traffic windows.
How servers help achieve optimised hosting:
- Servers can handle lots of simultaneous visitors so that websites load faster and don’t crash when there is high traffic.
- They reliably store all your data in a secure and organised fashion.
- Running continuously, they keep websites online at all times with no interruptions.
Compress and Resize Images
Images that are over 1MB can slow down your website, increasing loading times by 3-5 seconds. They can also make the page rendering slower and the site feel sluggish, particularly on mobile or slow networks.
Aim to use JPEG images that are less than 150KB and PNG files under 300KB. Compressing and resizing your images reduces the size, leading to faster loading times for your website.Using an image reducer can further streamline this process by decreasing file sizes while maintaining image quality, helping websites load faster and perform better.
How to resize your images:
- Open an image in an editing tool like Photoshop.
- Alter the dimensions to the exact pixel size you need.
- Save your resized image.
How to compress your images:
- Use an image compression tool to reduce the size of your file with an online tool like TinyPNG or Squoosh.
- Upload the image to the tool and download the compressed version.
Optimise Website for Better Browser Performance
By optimising your website, you will enable browsers to store your site’s data, which reduces the need for users to keep re-downloading content every time they visit it.
Minify your code to remove unnecessary characters and comments from your website’s code in a way that doesn’t require you to change how it functions. This can reduce file sizes by up to 60%. You can minimise files by using tools such as JavaScript Minifier and CSS Minifier. Additionally, you can build your website with custom ReactJS development services for web applications or with Next.js for better site performance.
Here’s how you can improve your site’s performance in users’ browsers:
- Use strong caching strategies to enable browsers to store website data.
- Optimise code and resources to keep heavy processing demands to a minimum.
- Conduct regular website tests with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check that your site is compatible with up-to-date speed and rendering improvements.
Use Lazy Loading
Lazy loading delays the loading of non-critical resources like images or videos up until they point they are needed. A clever technique, lazy loading prevents slow performance by prioritising what is immediately visible, which in turn makes the page appear to load quicker.
It is particularly effective on media-heavy websites and saves bandwidth by solely loading what the user sees. This improves user experience on slower connections and mobile devices.
You can apply lazy loading by using the loading="lazy" attribute on and
