While the future is unpredictable, we can almost guarantee that website speed will always matter. Site monitoring should be one of your top priorities. When your site speed is doing well, so are your rankings on search engines. If you prioritize this, you will improve site speed, and success in your business.
Improve Site Speed
Let’s face it, you want to be successful. A major aspect of your achievements is an effective online SEO strategy. As one of your key focuses, you should maintain good site speed.
If your site speed is fast, users will likely stay on your website and even explore more pages. Poor site speed will end up doing the exact opposite. You will lose users from the very first click if your site takes any longer than a few seconds to load.
So site speed is important, surely you’ve heard it over and over. How do you fix it? There is no real “quick fix” for this, but there are ways to improve site speed before it becomes too big of an issue.
Use CDN’s
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is essentially a collection of web servers in a series of locations, aiming to deliver content more efficiently. When choosing the right CDN for you, look into how many network hops each has. This is vital for your page, because the fewer the hops, the better the response time is on that server.
Reduce Image Size
This is probably one of the easiest ways to improve site speed right off the bat. As one of the biggest aspects of site speed, you should ensure your images are compressed. When your images are compressed, it simply just gives your server one less thing to load.
Limit JavaScript
Having a ton of JavaScript files is definitely going to affect your site speed negatively. It should come as no surprise that having a more files, means having more HTTP requests. When you have more requests, your site needs to process more information before the page is fully loaded. Which, naturally, can slow down your website.
Enable Caching
A split second can make all the difference when it comes to wanting to improve site speed. In fact, enabling caching can make a huge difference in site speed. Enabling caching means you are using space to save information of your website. Basically, next time the user visits your page, the server won’t have to pause to load the information all over again.
Pick a Good Host
Often times, people will go the cheap hosting route (shared hosting) when they are just starting out. However, much like most other things, you get what you pay for. As content and pages grow amongst the shared host, you will begin to notice your site slowing down. Private hosting may be the way to go, but ultimately depends on your webpages needs.
Moving Forward with Site Speed Improvements
As long as you are implementing the above ways to improve site speed, you should begin seeing results. Don’t forget, there are several tools to test your site speed. Additionally, fixing broken links, using reliable content management systems, and monitoring/removing plugins could potentially save your site.
Steve Scott is the CEO & Director of Training at the Tampa SEO Training Academy. He has taught SEO skills to people from around the world and currently offers his hands-on search engine optimization training workshops in Tampa to individuals and businesses of all sizes. Corporate SEO training classes and consulting are also available.
