Effective Tips to Fix a Slow Loading Website

The loading speed of a website is one of the crucial factors in making it successful. When, as a business owner, you hire professional website design services, you may mostly focus on the design, layout and appearance of the site. And in your quest towards achieving impressive design aesthetics, you may overlook the crucial aspect of the site’s loading speed. Further, thanks to the rise of smartphones, mobile web users have taken precedence in today’s times. So, when you make a business website design, it is important to make it mobile-friendly and fast loading.

The Importance of Site Speed

A study by Google showed that 53% of mobile visitors will leave a webpage that doesn’t load within three seconds. Slow speed is one of the biggest reasons behind a website’s increased bounce rate. No matter how good your site looks, a visitor will waste no time in leaving if the page takes too long to open.

High bounce rates for a website can negatively affect its SEO rankings and conversion rates. Hence, as a business owner, you must hire the best web design company in India to develop a fast and optimized site.

How to Increase Site Speed?

Improving your website’s loading speed needs some necessary fixes from the web developer’s end. Below, we look at some easy hacks that can help increase the site speed.

1. Minimize Your Code

If your website’s code is too heavy or bulky, it may take a longer time to load. If the code is too long, and contains several line breaks, unnecessary characters, spaces, and other elements, then it may potentially make the site slower. A bulky code looks messy and can hinder the loading speed.

The best way to deal with this is to minify the code. Whether it is JavaScript, CSS, or HTML code, there are automated plugins available that will minimize the website code without any hassle. This process removes all the unnecessary characters, line spaces, etc.

If you have a WordPress website, then you can use the plugin Better WordPress Minify to minimize your code. There are also third-party plugins, like Autoptimize and Fast Velocity Minify, that merge and optimize your CSS and JavaScript files along with minifying your code.

When you hire web design services in India, the expert web developers can manually go through each line of the code to minimize and make the site run faster.

2. Opt for a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The location of your web server and its distance to the site’s user does have an impact on a site’s loading speed. For example, if your server is located in India, then a user logging into the site from the USA might have to face a slow loading speed.
A CDN or a Content Delivery Network refers to a network of global servers that are strategically located in different parts of the world. By using a CDN, you can store copies of your website files on this global network of servers. This allows users from around the world to access your site from a server that’s located the closest to their physical location. This proximity helps in improving the loading speed.

Some of the popular CDN options to use for your site are Cloudflare, Jetpack CDN, and KeyCDN. If your business caters to a worldwide audience, then you must use a CDN to boost your site speed.
 
3. Deactivate Unnecessary Plugins

Too many plugins can sometimes make the site slow. Yes, plugins are extremely useful and increase the functionality of a website. At the same time, they can also be heavy and weigh down a site. If you’re using a pre-built website theme, your site may have many outdated and unnecessary plugins.

The easiest way to fix this is to deactivate the plugins that are not being used. When you hire a web design company to build your site, make sure to run a speed check before accepting the final delivery. If the results come low, open your plugin list and deactivate them one at a time. Then, run the speed test again and you will see the site speed has improved.

4. Optimize and Reduce the Size of Your Images

Images play a crucial part in making a website attractive and engaging. But if you use too many large-sized images, then it can make the site run slower. Anything large and heavy will negatively impact your site speed. Large media files, like images or videos, are no exception to this.

If you are using images on your site, make sure they are correctly optimized. One key aspect to follow is that the width of your image should never surpass the width of your webpage. For example, if you have a blog page that has a width of 900px, then the images you use shouldn’t be more than that.

There are also several plugins you can use to reduce the file size of images on a website. For example, WP Smush is a popular tool among WordPress users that automatically reduces the file size of an image. Tiny PNG and Squoosh are two other popular plugins that can be used to compress and optimize images.

Optimizing videos is a little more complex. The best solution is to upload the video on YouTube or some other video hosting platform. You can then easily embed the videos to add them to your site.

5. Enable Web Page Caching

Each time you open a site, certain elements or static copies of the site are stored in a cache. This way, the next time you visit the site, the server doesn’t have to load the entire data. Your web cache will have some of the elements present from the last time, which can reduce the loading time significantly.

When a web design company opts to keep the caching function on, it reduces the load on the server. Since much of the data is stored in the cache, the site doesn’t take much time to load for returning visitors. Enabling webpage caching is one of the most efficient ways to increase site speed.

If you’re using WordPress, you may use a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache. For other sites, the developer can add a few steps to switch on the caching function.

Final Takeaway

A website’s speed is a critical aspect in the success of an online business. A slow site speed means an unsatisfactory user experience, which can discourage potential customers from ever revisiting the site. It increases bounce rates and reduces conversions. Hire Logo Design India, the best web design company in India, to build your business website. We deliver fast, unique, and engaging websites to capture the audience’s attention.