• By admin

You have launched your website but are not sure why your website is not generating traffic. You know your business niche is in demand, but you are not able to gather up potential customers. Have you checked your website load time? If not, do so, as, if your website takes too much time to load or open up, you are most probably losing more than 50% of customers.

Slow loading of website is frustrating for user as well as for owners. During a survey it was found that people tend to leave the site if it takes more than 2 seconds to upload. It hinders your search engine optimisation, which can make your website ranking go low. This will in long run hinder your business as you will have less page clicks, less ad revenue, so less potential customers.

How can you check your website speed?

To confirm whether the reason for less traffic on your website is due to the slow loading of your website, you need to check what your website speed is. There are various free tools and apps available online which can help you in this. These are:

1. First one that you will come across is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It is very easy to use and even results are easy to understand by anyone. It gives suggestions like “consider fixing”, “passed rules” and many more.

2. Another that you will come across is Pingdom. Can be used by anyone doesn’t require much of technical knowledge. It will analyse your website performance, history and grades it, which will help you know how your website’s speed changed overtime.

3. GTmetrix is also a free tool available online, which is quite popular. It analyses your PageSpeed score and Yslow scores, will also give one ideas on boosting their load time.

4. YSlow is yet another one out there. It gives you score on your website’s performance and gives advices to improve it as well.

The result that you get can vary from one tool to another which is normal as their calculation parameters may be different. These tools will be able to give you a general idea on how your website is performing.

How to make your website load faster?

Don’t you be disheartened as we have researched and analysed some tried and tested ways which will surely boost up your website loading time, and in turn will increase your traffic, revenue and customers. These ways are:

1. First thing that you must do is to upgrade your hosting plan. It is the simplest and easiest way to improve your websites load time. When we start any site we generally use shared hosting which when your site becomes popular or large will result in slow speed. Shift to VPS or dedicated hosting. VPS is one option that is preferred over dedicated hosting by bloggers or small or medium business owners.

2. If you have too many HTTP requests it will slow down your website. IT is better to remove them. You can use above mentioned tools like pingdom which will analyse your website and will let you know which HTTP request the one is making the biggest difference in your load time.

3. Images are the biggest culprit that can slow down your website. The larger the size of your image more it will slow down the website. Use images that are internet friendly or just compress the size of the images which you are using on your site. Use less number of images or just be done with them, completely remove them. Use tools like Photoshop, or Gimp to change the resolution, compress the size and crop the picture so that it can be used on your
website.

4. You have to optimise JS and CSS files of your website. This can be achieved by minification or compression. Minification includes or means that you would be removing comments, whitespaces and reduce the hex code lengths as well. Compression means you will use pointers for all repeating strings, rather than using them again and again.
To attain best output you must use them together. Compression is a server level programming so it needs to be configured before using it.

5. Caching is when the web pages store the static pages, like images. This will help your website load time boost up as the database will not have to reload all the files every time there is request made. So you much utilize caching a lot. The only catch here is that it works for repeat customers rather than first time customers as there would not be any cached files for new user.

6. Last but not the least and maybe the toughest and complicated is to use CDN i.e. Content Delivery network. CDN is servers that are anywhere around the world are optimised and these provide user with the content based on the location of the user. Things that can be stored in CDN are CS file, Images, PDFs, videos, JF files as well. This is no cheap feat. It is a costly affair as you would be using lot of bandwidth. But if you own a big site it is a must.

Conclusion:

After going through the aforementioned six pointers which are tested and tried by many, it’s time for you to utilize them and make your website a hit. To start with just remove external scripts that are waste like SumoMe, Facebook like box and many more. This will only take five minutes of your time. Start and you will see the difference in your websites performance. After this go to the images which are easy enough and remove all big size images or you can compress them so that they can be loaded in no time. Use help of specialists if stuck somewhere. In the end it is necessary to analyse your site as only then you would be seeing increase in revenue and traffic on your site.