Hosting Tribunal reports that every extra second your site takes to load results in:
- 7% fewer conversion
- 11% loss in page views
- 87% shopping cart abandonment
- 43% of shoppers go to competitors
Loading speed is crucial to retain your customers and help new ones discover your business. So how do you speed up a website? It’s simple. Unlike what many people may think, creating a sleek, fast site is exceptionally straightforward- especially if you use Mindspun. In this article, we will discuss some key ways you can speed up your website.
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Ways To Improve Website Speed
The first thing you’ll find when you run speed tests is that specific tools come with some common problems. While there are multiple factors involved with site speed, there are also standard improvement techniques in any situation. Also, keep in mind that a neatly coded domain, like the one Mindspun offers, will always trump a poorly coded one! If you choose Mindspun, you won’t have to worry about poor coding issues, as long as they stick with our tested plugins and premium themes. If you have a custom-coded website, you should use a written code that follows standard best practices and do regular maintenance on your text and image files. Here are some of the best ways to speed up your website and give your site’s performance a leg up.
GZIP Compression
Text files that are unzipped can freak out a web browser. Downloading a 100KB HTML file puts so much strain on the browser! You can make the browser’s life easier by asking your server to compress files before passing them on. A browser won’t have to work as hard when the files are zipped to load your site faster. The question here is: which compression technique should you use? Your web server isn’t able to trim files any way it wants to. If the user’s browser cannot figure out the compressed files you’re shoving down its throat, nothing will end up loading on the screen. The viewer will become too annoyed, hit the dreaded back button, and never revisit your site. That’s why it’s essential to use a compression technique that popular browsers can easily read. At the same time, you need to make sure that all your files are compressed significantly to help with overall page speed optimization.
GZIP is an excellent tool for this kind of compression. The majority of web browsers and hosts support this compression technique. Moreover, it can also reduce your text files’ size, such as HTML and CSS files, substantially. Text files use a lot of similar code, which GZIP temporarily replaces in your HTML and CSS files, lightening them instantaneously.
Compress Images
As useful a tool as GZIP is, GZIP still can’t thin down your images. This is because they’re not compressed in the same way text files are. You must compress images since they impact the speed of your site a significant amount. Image files are typically quite big and can thus seriously impact loading speed. If you don’t trim them, achieving page speed optimization will always be a struggle. Of course, not having any images is not an option with today’s visually-driven audience. 66% of online shoppers said they prefer to see at least three product images before making a purchase! Product photos can help significantly with conversion, especially if they load quickly.
If you are a user of Mindspun, we have tools that are lightweight, easy to install and work fantastically to compress your images. Within seconds our tools can customize all of your new photos, which is extremely helpful if you wonder how to speed up your website. Don’t ignore this easy fix- compressing images can help you speed up image loading a significant amount!
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Content Delivery Networks
A web server has to spend computing power to process each site access request it receives. If traffic is regular, then everything is fine, and the server can send the requested web page to a browser quickly without any issues. If traffic soars, however, the server will need more time to complete each request. This means that the load time for users will increase during periods of high traffic. For 52% of customers, page loading time is a critical deciding factor for potential future visits. On top of that, 44% of shoppers report sharing a negative online experience with others. You need a way to help your server deal with the deluge of requests it receives during peak hours more efficiently.
Another major factor that slows down website speed is distance. The further the server, the slower the pace. If you are based in the UK, for example, but most of your users are in the Netherlands, they may have slower loading speeds because your server is far away from them.
The good news is that you can give the server a hand and boost your website speed by making sure there is an extra pair of shoulders sharing site traffic responsibilities. A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a distributed server system that can speed up your content delivery during rush hours and for users who are very far from your server. You use a CDN to cache your static content on different servers worldwide so that when a user requests to view your content, the server physically closest to them can handle the request. The cache servers in a CDN work arm-in-arm with your primary server and assist with website speed. There are plenty of CDN options for you to consider.
Looking for a website that guarantees speed? Build your site with Mindspun!
Get Rid Of Useless Plugins
One of the best features of building your website with Mindspun is that we aren’t bloated with plugins nobody uses. It can be easy to install too many plugins, and the more you install, the bigger the load on your database. Whenever users request a plugin, it checks the database for information, which takes time and resources. More plugins mean more queries, which results in a long loading time. Having too many plugins is never a good idea. However, if you build your website with Mindspun, you will never have any outdated plugins that compromise your website speed even further!
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When you build your website with Mindspun, you never have to worry about bloated loading times and prolonged waits. Mindspun is fast, simple, and sleek.
Our servers offer next to no downtime. Build your site with Mindspun today.
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