Top 8 Ways to Increase Your Website Speed in 2022

Website speed is the most important thing taken into account nowadays. No matter what type of website you are running, the visitors on your website will want the pages on your website to load very quickly. However, in the case of mobile devices, speed is considered the most important factor. It is said that 53 % of the visitors will leave if your website is taking too long to upload. However, to increase your website speed, there are many things that you can do. To increase your speed, you will either have to learn a programming language or make changes to your posting content.

Importance of website speed

The time it requires the website to load is one of the most critical aspects of the website. The Speed of the website is taken into account whenever a search engine is about to rank your website. If the website’s speed is slow, then it wouldn’t rank higher in the rankings. A fast website provides a good user experience, Whereas a slower website shows that the website is non-responsive, and thus there’s a chance that you will lose your visitor. Many people nowadays use SSDs to load their programs faster, if your website loads slower on the SSD, then that is bad news for your user. The slower website performs a slower operation, and thus in the case of an ecommerce website, a slow website can have a negative impact on the business. Thus it’s better that you take practical steps to increase your website speed. 

Steps you should follow to increase your website speed

There are many ways that you can improve your website speed. Some methods are easier, whereas some ways are a little complex. However, for each website, the ways differ. So in our article, we will discuss a few ways which you can use to increase your website’s speed.

1- Improving the images of the website

The large images take a lot of time to load. The high-resolution images show the speed of the website down to a great extent. Many times users upload a 3000-pixel image and use code to shrink it to 150 pixels. This is not a good practice. The way to deal with this issue is to manually size the image and upload it to the website. For example, if you want a 150-pixel picture on the website, you should upload a 150-pixel wide image. It is also better to upload JPEG and PNG format images on the websites rather than other complex formats. This will drastically increase your website speed.

2- Removing the plugin of your website

Some plugins on your website have to go. As these plugins slow down your website. CMS like WordPress has a lot of plugins on the website for customization purposes. However, there is no need to add more plugins as it will make your website lag. Most people add more plugins to the website because of its appeal. However, if you want to increase your website speed then make sure that you keep as few plugins on your website as possible.

3- Make your website up to date

Most of the websites are still running on the code which was written a long time ago. This makes the website inefficient. The website might be running on outdated code and following the old HTML practices. The same is the case when it comes to the theme. Old or obsolete themes make the website lag a lot. However, if you want to increase your website speed, you must re-write the code. You have to ensure that the code follows the new HTML practices. If the theme is old, then change it into a fresh piece. That is true in the case of WordPress. You can get this done by hiring services from the best bespoke website design agency.

4- Improving the home page

It is considered to be a good practice to keep less content on your homepage. Having too many posts on your website will decrease its speed. People who develop websites follow the practice of keeping the least amount of posts possible when it comes to the homepage. This means removing banners, video content, and banners on your website and showing only the most shared posts possible. Also, some of the developers have developed homepages with little to no amount of scrolling. So that users don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the web pages. Thus this way, the homepage of your website can be improved, and this will increase your website speed also.

5- Check your host

Sometimes you have to consider the capabilities of your host as well. As you can’t just blame all the problems of your slow speed on the image sizes and coding. Consider getting a dedicated server. Don’t just leave your hosting provider. Considering a dedicated server is a good option as most of the hosting accounts are shared on many servers, and thus they are competing for the resources. If you select a dedicated server for yourself, then it might be expensive, but it will increase your website speed. Since it’s a dedicated server, all the resources will be allocated to you.

6- Caching to increase your website speed

What a browser does is that it increases the loading speed of the website by storing some of the information on the website. So whenever the user returns to the website, they don’t have to load much. The browser, in this case, saves the static features of the website. These are the features that don’t have to change whenever the website is in the state of loading. This includes images, style sheets, etc. This is all saved by the browser in the form of cookies. Thus this cuts down on the website loading time. So, a lot of the time could be saved this way.

7- Asynchronous Loading

Mostly the CSS and Java files are loaded synchronously. This means that when one file is loading, the other file has to wait for its turn. This can decrease the speed of your website. Thus it will take longer for your file to load. So in order to combat this issue, another way was taken. It was decided to switch to Asynchronous loading. In this type of loading, the web pages can be loaded simultaneously. You don’t have to wait for one file to load so that the others can be loaded. As all the files can be loaded in one go. Through this manner, you can increase your website speed.

8- Try lazy loading

You should use this plugin if you have a lot of media on your webpage. This includes GIFs, images, videos, etc. You can use this plugin on your WordPress website. In lazy loading, only those images are loaded that are in your line of sight. The other images that are not in your line of view are actually ignored. So media is only loaded for you when you need it to be loaded. Otherwise, the images will not be loaded. This way is employed to make sure that you can get the content of your website to be loaded very quickly and thus increase your website speed.

Conclusion

As you know, content is king. However, the content has to be placed on the website in such a way that it doesn’t decrease your website speed. As speed is a very important attribute. The website wouldn’t be able to generate traffic if its speed is slower. A slower speed means that you might lose your visitors a lot. However, in the case of e-commerce websites, losing a visitor means losing business. So in this article, we have discussed several ways that can make the visitor hooked to your website. Applying these tricks and tips will give you the most results and increase your website speed. This will be beneficial to your website in the longer run.

Ellie Singh
Ellie Singh

Ellie Singh is the founder and CEO of a web development agency Manchester, UK. With over 5 years of experience in the industry, Ellie has a deep understanding of the latest web technologies and a passion for creating high-quality, responsive websites that help businesses succeed online. Ellie started the agency with the goal of providing affordable and effective web development services to companies in Manchester and has since grown the agency to a team of experienced developers who share her vision.