The more your website delays in loading, the lesser your page views. Asides from this, you also miss out on potential conversions, and this also affects core metrics like your bounce rates and rankings. You leave a potential customer dissatisfied, and this negatively impacts your sales.
You need a fast-loading website to really succeed at ranking well on Google and being visible online. If you are having trouble with this, this article is for you. Here’s how to increase your website loading speed.
Enhance loading time by reducing the volume of your l HTTP requests
Research shows that downloading the various components of a web page takes up 80% of the loading time. A slow-loading website most likely has a lot of components, and because each of these items requires an HTTP request, the longer it takes for the page to render.
To boost your website speed volume, you should examine how many requests your site currently generates and use that number as a benchmark. On Google Chrome, you may check the number of HTTP requests your site makes utilizing the developer tools in the browser.
All you need do is right-click the page you need an analysis on. You will find inspect and network tabs. You can find this on the developer tools sidebar. Under this, the name, size, and duration with which each file loads will show. On the same screen, the total request that the site makes when users interact will be shown too. You can examine and edit any files that do not have importance. By taking out unnecessary files, your site will speed up, the results may not be immediate, but they will show up with the other actions below.
Reduce file sizes by minimizing and combining
With the information you now have on the number of requests your website makes, you can work towards reducing the amount. This is particularly useful for people who use website-building templates. Those are easy to use, but they sometimes come with messy code that will disturb the speed of your website. You will need to check the vital files if you use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or a combination of any. Minimizing your files will reduce the size of each and delete unnecessary code and formatting, thereby freeing it up to load faster. If you have both JavaScript and CSS files, you can combine them too.
If you need a tool to do this, you should check out third-party providers. For websites that run on WordPress, you can find a plug-in like WP rocket.
Check your static files and edit as you wish. You can then save the changes you have made. After this, it will be time to reload your page and see what looks different. Reopen developer tools and compare the difference.
With websites, the lesser the files, the better. The fewer elements on the page, the fewer requests to load your page. By adopting a minimalistic website, you allow your website to load faster. Need a website audit? Explore our services here.