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Steps to Increasing Page Speed

In the digital realm, speed = revenue.

Case in point? According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

3 seconds?!

That means that if your site takes more than three seconds to load, you’re probably losing almost half of your visitors before they even catch a glimpse of your home page. And for every second beyond that, bounce rates increase dramatically. In fact, as page load time increases from one second to six, the probability of a visitor leaving your site increases by 106%.

Yep, when it comes to converting visitors to customers, speed matters – especially on mobile, which now accounts for approximately half of worldwide web traffic. But even if you’ve already built a responsive website, there’s much more you can do to ensure it loads lightning fast.

So, here’s the big question for today’s post:

How can I increase my page speed?

 

  1. Use a cache. Content management systems like WordPress (the platform BARQAR uses to build sites) have handy plugins that cache (store) the latest version of your pages. With cached content available, a user’s browser isn’t forced to dynamically build a page every single time it’s visited – so the content loads much more quickly.
  2. Minimize HTTP requests. The majority of a typical website page’s load time is spent downloading images, stylesheets (code controlling how page content is displayed), and scripts (code that controls how a website behaves in response to user clicks, hovering, etc.). An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements – and more requests increase the time it takes for a page to render fully. Combine and “minify” (i.e., remove unnecessary formatting, whitespace, and code) HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce the number of HTTP requests a browser needs to make your pages render – and boost load speed.
  3. Optimize images. Optimize your image files so that they’re large enough to be crisp, but no bigger than they need to be to display well.

Related content: Technical SEO: Why Is It Important?

 

  1. Don’t skimp on hosting. Cheaper isn’t necessarily better when it comes to website hosting. While shared hosting is less expensive, your site may perform poorly when traffic spikes to other sites using the same server as you. Make sure you carefully evaluate your needs and options (i.e., shared, VPS, or dedicated server) to ensure your server doesn’t slow down your response times.
  2. Use a fast domain name system (DNS) provider. A DNS lookup is the process an internet service provider uses to find the IP address of your website’s URL. The amount of time this takes depends on how fast your DNS provider is, so make sure yours stacks up well against the competition.

Is your website slow like molasses?

Speed it up! Let BARQAR’s marketing experts build a dynamic, high-performing, responsive website that loads fast – to attract, engage, and convert more visitors.

Get your free website audit from BARQAR today.

 

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