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| Site load time infographics |
Have you ever come across a website that loads very slowly? So slowly, that it eventually gets on your nerves and almost immediately you decide to leave it? Well, if that is the case, you probably would be wondering what would happen to YOUR site traffic if your website gave the same slowpoke treatment to your website's visitors. It'd look pretty ugly if you were on the wrong side here. So dont worry, because this post will tell you about ways that you can learn and implement which in turn will help you reduce your site load times. This post will teach you how to speed up your website load times. Let's first discuss why does it matter really?
Why does it matter?
Analytics say:
-A Regular smartphone user will abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
-Unfortunately, Google is punishing the websites with slow load times and is ranking them based upon that in it's search algorithm.
-Almost 76% of the internet users say, they won't come back to a particular website, if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.
Okay now let's just find out how fast your site can load.
To check your website load time, you might use http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ , which provides you reliable results for the load times on your website.
Now if you wanted an even more detailed analysis and wanted to pluck out the weeds and the bottlenecks by learning how to fix them, you could just go to this tool by Google itself:
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
You just gotta enter your site URL in the box and click ''Analyze''
This provides you with the detailed insights of your website and teaches you how to fix those errors.
Troubleshooting simplified, i would say!
Now let's talk about the insights in a detailed manner.
1) Re-sizing and optimizing the images on your website
Now this is by far the easiest way out there to reduce your load times. You just have to reduce the size of the images in your blog posts before publishing them. The size of the images also contributes to how fast your website can load. So be sure to trim your images before they are set to appear on your website. You can make use of online tools such as TinyPNG which can help reduce your image sizes.
2) Cutting Down CSS, JavaScript and HTML
This means you have to cut down on white spaces i.e. gaps between the characters in the code. It means you are kind of compressing the code before it is published on your website. You can make use of tools such as CSS compressor, W3 total cache to name a few.
3) Browser cache
Most of the times, you have elements on your page that do not change much over time and are meant to remain static. You can take advantage of this situation by asking the browser to obtain a cached copy of your website in their hard drive. So, the next time a particular user who has visited in the past visits your website again, these elements need not be downloaded again and hence the page load time becomes faster.
4) Making sure your Apps, widgets are up to date
Sometimes it so happens that your apps and widgets on your website are not upto date. This also becomes a bottleneck in load times. So make sure all of your apps and widgets are up to date and do not present security threats too.
5) Your Server should be lightning fast
Now your choice of server has a crucial role in determining your site load time too, because the higher the response of the server, the faster your website would get. Getting a hosting provider that is critically acclaimed and has a fierce reputation can make this possible for you. Recommended Hosting sites are Hostgator, BigRock, BlueHost.
These are some of the tactics you would need to follow to speed up your website load times.So what are you waiting for? Implement this on your website already because Google doesn't favor slow loading sites.
Thank you and have a good day. Stay tuned to Knowbabble for more posts like this.
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