It’s time to optimize your website to ensure that load times are speedy. A rapidly loading website is not only good for the user, but for your overall search engine optimization goals. Did you know that a one second delay means conversions decrease by 7% and page views decrease by 11%? Well, it’s true and it’s hurting your end game!
There are numerous things that can lengthen your load time, so it is important to work with a skilled web development team to remedy the situation. Below you’ll find some of the actionable changes that can be made to reduce the load times and increase conversions.
Images and video on your website can be a very big reason your load times are long. It’s time to reduce the size of all your media assets. Your full-size images are just taking up space when in reality they only need to be 500 pixels wide. Make sure you size the images according to the design of your page.
Your image files typically need to be JPG files. This file type is compressed to maintain the integrity of the image while taking up a minimal amount of storage space. If you need an image where transparency is a feature, look to a PNG file, but only use them when necessary.
HD video can be far too large for a quick page load. It is best to compress all the video on your page. You can use a tool like Clipchamp Utilities or Wondershare Video Converter Free. You can also embed these videos on your site using a 3rd party video hosting platform like Vimeo or Wistia to reduce the impact on your hosting server’s bandwidth.
There are many helpful plugins, depending on your CMS, that can leverage caching and page speed. Cached pages are served as static HTML versions of the page that help avoid time-consuming queries to the website database. Cached pages load more quickly and decrease your server load significantly. Popular page caching plugins include W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket. Your web development team can easily install one of these plugins on your website and start optimizing as needed.
Avoid using inexpensive, shared hosting platforms for your website. Your web hosting package can significantly impact load speed. Put your money on a high-performing VPS, managed or dedicated web hosting platform with faster technology stacks and options to fine tune your server.
It is definitely worth your time and money to partner with Vervocity in order to optimize your website for faster load speed. Our skilled team is ready to jump in and handle all these things that might be a bit of a mystery to the average website owner. Consider a website hosting and security plan upgrade for you website. For a free speed assessment and to see what we can do for your site, give Vervocity a call at (217) 222-1451.
