Optimize Page Load Time from 18 to 2 Seconds: Increase Conversions by Decreasing Site Speed!

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Jul 11, 2022

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11 min read

Have you ever wondered why your website loads so slowly? Here are 10 of the most frequent
causes of sluggish website loading speeds, along with suggestions for addressing them. Avoid being tardy!

A user will likely leave your page and cost you a conversion if they click through to one of your website’s pages and have to wait for it to load for more than a few seconds.

The proportion of visitors to a website who complete the desired action is known as the conversion rate, and it closely correlates with the amount of money a website brings in. Page speed has a significant impact on user behavior. A slow website is almost as bad as having no website at all.

Site speed is the combined performance of all the pages on your website; page speed measures how quickly a browser can fully load all your web page elements. It impacts your website’s conversion rates and revenue, and search engines utilize the metric to determine where your website appears on the SERPs. To put it simply: Site speed matters. Slow websites risk losing customers, having poorer conversion rates, and having lower search engine ranks.

In today’s hurried and impatient world, keeping your website’s visitors waiting while it loads appears distasteful.

You may have heard the saying “patience is a virtue,” which means it’s a nice trait to have to wait for something without feeling discouraged. The virtue of patience goes out the window for most of us when a page takes too long to load. The faster your website loads, the more satisfied your visitors will be. You could ask whether shortening your website’s page load time by a few milliseconds substantially impacts client satisfaction and business expansion.

The longer it takes for a page on your website to load, the more probable you will lose visitors.

Continue reading for Saffron Edge’s overview of website load times and how they might affect how people perceive your business.

Why is Page Speed So Crucial?

Page speed is the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte from a web server or display all the content on a certain page. The HTML code and CSS used to style page elements, different JavaScript files, photos, videos, and other multimedia, among many other things, all impact how quickly a page loads. The size of an element (measured in kilobytes) or the speed of the web server it is housed on can affect how fast page loads.

In other words, there is a high possibility that visitors will leave your website if your pages don’t load quickly enough. Furthermore, sluggish web pages may reduce your ability to increase engagement and conversions. Additionally, page speed has a significant impact on SEO. Google takes various factors into account when deciding how to rank web pages. Nevertheless, both desktop and mobile searches place a high value on speed.

Page speed is essential since it may impact how customers perceive your brand. If your web pages take too long to load or something goes wrong while loading, your website could be seen as unprofessional and unreliable. Therefore, you must optimize page performance to run a highly effective website. The first step in this process is to evaluate how well your web pages perform.

How to Increase Website Performance?

As an internet user, slow websites are nothing new to you. Even if it may only seem to be a little annoyance, poor performance can have an impact on the entire organization. The outcomes vary, ranging from customer satisfaction to the business’s financial line. It’s critical to realize that there is no magic solution to speeding up loading times. Depending on your website’s current setup, some techniques might provide more value for your money.

However, you must use as many optimization strategies as possible to guarantee that your site loads quickly.

 

1. Run a Site Speed Diagnosis

Understanding how quickly your website loads is the next step in improving site performance. You should keep an eye on site performance whenever you install a plugin or make any other changes to your website and want to see how they affect load times.

You will undoubtedly start to wonder how to make your site faster and more effective once you have established your website performance for both desktop and mobile. This website SEO in action may raise your SERP rankings, keep visitors on your site longer, generate more leads, and even increase sales.

For instance, use a tool like the WP Engine Performance Tool for WordPress-specific guidance on increasing your website’s speed and load time. You will receive an email with precise recommendations for optimizing your site’s loading speed after entering the URL of your site.

2. Remove Inactive Plugins and Themes

Themes: You should remove any nonessential themes from your website because they can cause it to load more slowly. The size of your backup file grows due to themes consuming disk space. The second problem is that you must periodically update the themes whenever the theme creators release an update. Your website becomes susceptible to security vulnerabilities if neither the developer nor you maintain the website.

Plugin: Suppose your website is powered by WordPress or a comparable platform and depends on plugins for additional functionality. In that case, such plugins may be slowing down your site’s performance, impacting its interactivity metrics, and hindering your website speed optimization. Numerous plugins ask for information from external servers, which could cause the web page to load more slowly. For website performance optimization, the fewer plugins you employ, the better, as additional plugins may bloat your database, making it take longer to load and unnecessarily increasing the weight of your site.

3. Organize Your Media Collection

Two default directories in the media library are created automatically and cannot be removed. They both have names that cannot be changed. These two standard folders consist of:

All Files:

This folder was automatically produced and contained all the media files you have added to your website. You can only change the files in this folder; you cannot change or delete the folder itself.

Uncategorized Media Files:

This is the second automatically created folder that solely displays media files that are currently unclassified. It is also not changeable, so you cannot delete or rename it; instead, you may only make changes to the files inside.

4. Purge Your Database

The process of permanently deleting inactive or redundant records from a database is known as data purging. It should be considered for companies with a clear, strong growth rate that can quickly accumulate substantial volumes of data.

The database of your website will certainly fill up over time. This irrelevant material can make your website load slowly. To speed up loading, you could, however, lower the size of your database by regular maintenance. Manually cleaning your database with tools like phpMyAdmin is possible but can be difficult and destructive if you are not experienced.

If you lack technological expertise, installing a plugin or taking professional help to do this process is the safer option. Numerous trustworthy methods exist, such as WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner, for deleting invalid revisions, spam comments, MySQL queries, and other database-related items.

5. Remove Render-obstructing Javascript and CSS

Because you have to be careful not to postpone the necessary CSS, removing CSS that prohibits the display of above-the-fold material can sometimes be a little more challenging. The essential rendering path can be shortened and page load times decreased by lowering the number of render-blocking resources, which will also improve user experience and Search Engine Optimization.

There are three techniques to lessen render-blocking resources’ impact and quantity:

  • Delay the download of these resources to make them non-render blocking resources.
  • Reduce the total amount of render-blocking resources by employing strategies like bundling. This also means fewer HTTP requests.
  • Utilize minification to shrink the size of a resource so that the website loads faster.

6. Reduce the size of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript

Could you minify one of your resources to make it less expensive?

By eliminating pointless code, utilizing shorter variable and function names, and other techniques, minification refers to the reduction of unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the browser handles the resource. Over time, the accumulation of CSS, HTML, and other source code files can cause your website to load sluggishly. It would be best to minimize your website’s code to increase performance.

Through minification, the backend of your website will be streamlined to become a lean machine. This technique shrinks the file size of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS texts by deleting unnecessary characters like whitespace, line breaks, and comments. This lessens the amount of data transfer required, enabling files to run more quickly and web pages to load more rapidly.

7. Optimize Images

The most frequent cause of a website’s delay is many poorly optimized images. When loading, high-resolution photographs might use much bandwidth. Scaling down larger-sized pictures after uploading them can unnecessarily increase the size of your web page, slowing down your website’s loading. It is true regardless of the CMS and website builder you choose.

Another significant aspect to take into account is the image format.

Key Takeaways:
  • Make sure your image files are under 1MB; anything larger is truly inappropriate.
  • JPEG is preferable to PNG, particularly for larger photos.
  • To quickly check image sizes and make corrections, use Waterfall testing.
  • Images that aren’t optimized can cost you money by using up more bandwidth.
  • Make sure a front-end developer handles your website’s development. Front-end developers are often better at taming JavaScript on the client’s side and can address any JS/jQuery issues due to the changes in the development scope.

8. Lazy-load Long Pages

High-resolution graphics might make your website take longer to load while also using more memory and weighing the page down. They must be completely removed from your page, but you need to wish to leave them there. Using lazy loading, you can shorten the time it takes for a website to load without removing any of your resource-intensive content.

The following section won’t start to load until the user scrolls down to it since lazy loading only loads the portion of the website that the viewer is currently viewing at a given time. Although lazy loading is necessary for infinite scrolling, which is most typically utilized on content-heavy websites, it can be useful on various web pages.

9. Limit Comments Per Page

Although it’s wonderful to see such a high interest in your blog posts or website, many comments may slow down page load times. To make the comment section load faster, it is a good idea to separate it into several pages.

Auto-approving everything is not a good idea. Your website will quickly attract spammers, and the comments section will look more like a battlefield than a place for advice and communication. You can control comments on all-powerful blogging platforms and websites. Change the settings on your website so that comments are sent directly to your email account so you may see them before they are posted on the page.

Moreover, you can turn off blog comments. This can reduce the number of HTTP requests and database calls made during page load time. The website will become quicker and more efficient, and users will experience a shorter loading time when reading the content.

10. Reduce Redirection

Redirects are a little bit tricky. On the one hand, they help visitors to your website find the right pages. However, redirecting them makes your pages load more slowly than they should.

Here are a few steps you can do to maintain minimal redirects for a website that is properly optimized.

  • Never link to a page that you are aware contains a redirect. It will only lead to a lot of redirects and a frustrated visitor.
  • Plugins might cause pointless redirection, so remove those that aren’t necessary.
  • Check your website frequently for outdated redirects that point to sites you deleted in the past. This is a wise move when changing hosting companies or substantially updating the content of your website.
  • Try the Redirection plugin if you use WordPress to receive notifications of new redirection, 404 errors, and other loose ends.

Page Speed is now more important than ever!

The number of HTTP requests, the code size, unoptimized pictures used, and JavaScript compatibility are just a few variables that affect how quickly a website loads its pages.

Determining the precise reason why a website is running slowly might be challenging. No matter the underlying cause, you should investigate every possibility to find a solution because failing to do so could cost you an extra $1000 monthly in revenue. Therefore, everything suffers if your web pages are slow.

Optimizing your server for class-leading performance is more crucial than ever because every millisecond counts.

Want a Website That Runs Blazing Fast?

At Saffron Edge, we manage the full optimization procedure from the ground up and remove superfluous parts from your site that can increase the loading time. The skilled web development team’s method has been demonstrated to provide remarkable outcomes for businesses worldwide and elevate your organization to the highest level.

Saffron Edge is a highly qualified web development team that has developed a quick, effective, and affordable procedure for accomplishing site speed optimizations for the brands they partner with. Get in touch with us today.

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