Boost Your SEO with Faster Website Speed: Tips and Tricks for Optimal Loading Time

In today's fast-paced digital world, people expect websites to load right away. If not, then you probably just lost them as a customer and they'll likely go find another website for whatever they need. In fact, according to a study by Google, 53% of mobile users leave if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

So, what can you do to improve your website speed and keep your users engaged to potentially turn into customers? Here are some tips:

1. Optimise Images

Images usually take a lot of time to load up, especially when you have a number of them together on the same page. However, you don't need to get rid of them, in fact, you can fix it in a couple simple steps. Throw your images into web tools like TinyPNG or Compressor.io and you'll be able to shrink your image sizes a lot while still not seeing any quality difference.

Now, if you have a big website this can end up being a long and tedious task. A little trick we've found is to find an image optimiser plugin for your website builder. Keep in mind, this won't work on every website builder as it's not always supported.

2. Minimise HTTP Requests

When a page loads, it sends requests to the server to get everything it needs. The more requests your website makes, the longer it will take to load. To make this not as big of an issue you can combine CSS and JavaScript files into one and use CSS sprites to get the number of image requests down. However, when you do this make sure to flick through your website to see if there are any issues.

Note, this is usually only an issue if your website uses a lot of 'heavy' elements like javascript maps, etc. So if you have a simple website, you can possibly skip over this step.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Simply put, a CDN gives your website the ability to pull data from servers located closest to your users. Meaning it doesn't have as much of a distance to travel, giving your page a load time that's a lot faster.

If you're not sure how to go about this, we've found a great article to help you out. You can click this link to learn more: A Beginner's Guide to Using CDNs - Pingdom

4. Enable Caching

One way you can save a ton of load up time is through storing the files needed on a user's computer, so they don't have to be downloaded every time they visit your website. To set this up, have a look at your website builder and domain provider to see how you can enable caching.

It should only be a switch that can be toggled on or off, but this would vary between softwares.

5. Minimize Code

The more code your website has, the longer it'll take to load. To shrink it down, you can use a minifier tool. It takes out characters and whitespace from your code that you don't need.

This is all done for you so you don't need to go through the code yourself, but you might want to double check your website and see if you can see any issues.

6. Choose a Reliable Web Host

If nothing seems to work for you, the issue will be your web host. If your host's servers are slow, that'll be the same for your websites loading time. So, make sure to choose a host that can handle your website's traffic and still provide fast loading times.

Website speed can make it or break it for your SEO and user engagement, so make sure to not skip over this when planning your SEO growth strategy. If you need any help with your SEO or want to learn more about how you can get more users online, then don't hesitate to get in touch.