As a website owner, you most likely have used SERP tracking for your site to check on the performance of your pages on search engines.
With so much of SEO to take up your attention, it is essential for a web developer to consider the user experience optimization. Your audience needs to always come first in your SEO marketing strategies.
Therefore, are you aware of how fast your pages load? Pages that take a shorter time to load, provide the best experience to users, and hence are preferable than are others.
Are you looking to reduce the page load time for your site? Here are five simple ways to get there:
Optimize images
A lot of images and files are the top reason while your page takes a long time to load, just because they can take up to 50% of the average bytes loaded on a page as well as a massive amount of HTTP requests.
If you require to use large images for your site, ensure you run them through an optimization software before using them. Ensure you keep your pictures within the 150 KB mark because anything more significant will take more time to load as well as take up more bandwidth.
Remember to be keen on the formats of your image, that is, JPEG is better suited for photographs, SVG for vector images, while PNG for images with transparent backgrounds. Your goal should be to reduce the image size as much as possible without compromising on its quality.
Use caches
Browser caching is how your site can be downloaded to a temporary storage space – cache. These files are stored locally on your system so that your subsequent pages can load at a higher speed.
Some of the files cached include html files, JavaScript scripts, graphic images, among other multimedia content.
How browser caching works is that when a user visits a page on your site, the browser only loads up on updated content that is not already downloaded in the temporary storage space, which automatically cuts down on the page load time. This is especially helpful to the repeat visitors.
Cut down on ads
The fact about making money on websites is that advertisements have to be a crucial part of it. Ads, however, do not have a high conversion rate and can be just useful for cluttering your site.
Banner ads and pop-up ads are among the various multimedia forms of ads that can slow down your page load time.
Remember that ads are a common way through which malware sneaks into users’ devices, and can cause a cyber-security breach, which misguides the users to relate your site to malware. Consider posting few multimedia ads on your platform, and while at it, optimize them.
Reduce Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests
These requests are transmitted when a search engine picks up a file or page from a server. These requests tend to take up to 75% of load time, which means the more applications your site transmits, the longer it takes to load.
To minimize the HTTP request on your site:
Reduce the number of images on your site –large images can cost your page a couple of seconds to load, and if you can do without them, the better. Focus on keeping the relevant images that suitable compliment your page’s content.
Use CSS sprites to combine images that you tend to use frequently, so that you can access them from one sprite sheet and cut down on the HTTP requests transmitted.
Review your web hosting
It is essential that y choose the right hosting option for the unique needs of your site. The web hosting you are using may have been suitably effective at the launch of your website, but with time, an upgrade will serve you justly.
Once you begin to attract more traffic, your pages may jam which would require a different hosting option:
Shared hosting- this is the cheapest hosting option that provides enough space for basic requirements of a website, which means sharing resources with other sites hosted on the same server.
VPS hosting- this option is also shared among different sites, although with some portions of the server’s resources dedicated to your specific site.
Dedicated server- For well-established sites, this hosting option is what they rely on as it has the most space from all the other hosting options. It dedicates all server resources specific to your website and has the fastest page load time.
If your site is not picking up on speed, consider changing your hosting option!
While it is not entirely cast upon a stone how much page load time is appropriate for a site, it is valuable to you that your pages take the shortest time possible to deliver content to the audience if at all your SEO efforts will adequately serve their purpose. Adopt these five simple hacks for on your website and achieve the best user experience for your target audience.
