As a marketer, you most likely understand the importance of page load speeds very well, and this is especially important for landing pages where people often make the decision to stay or leave within the first few seconds.
Luckily, there are many ways of reducing your page load times to ensure that your lead stays on your page and successfully converts.
Compress and optimise images
Great images always enhance your pages’ appearance and add to the quality of the content but be careful what kind of images you choose, as large ones can significantly affect load times.
One of the best ways to cut down page load times is to compress and optimise images. This may involve anything from enabling lazy loading to changing file formats and compressing images, either through lossy or lossless compression.
Reducing an image’s file size means you can reduce its ‘weight’, helping your pages load faster.
Make sure your web pages are cached
It’s no secret that caching is one of the best ways to boost page load speeds. The simple process of storing copies of your site’s files on the user’s device, means that your main server does not have to work as hard to ‘serve’ the required web page on the visitor’s web browser when required.
Web page caching can be done at the server level (your host will handle this for you) or you can use a WordPress caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket.
Turn on browser caching
Browser caching is a great way of improving page loading speeds as it enables the user’s browser to store different kinds of information – such as images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files – so that the entire page does not have to be loaded from scratch every time the user opens it.
We’d again recommend the WP Rocket caching plugin to optimise your pages’ speed via page caching and cache pre-loading, ultimately, helping you create really fast page loads!
Reduce redirects
A few redirects may be needed to take your visitor to the appropriate page, although too many will definitely hurt loading times – each time a page redirects to another URL within your site, it delays the HTTP request and response cycle.
With that said, redirects may not even be needed in some cases – e.g. when you want to move to a new domain. But in any case, you’d want to keep redirects as low as possible. Unnecessary redirects in WordPress can be reduced while building menus and internal links, for example. Another neat way of reducing redirects is to ensure that your TLD (top-level domain) resolves after just one redirect.
If you want to identify redirects that are not serving any real purpose then consult our team of WP website developers who would be happy to optimise your page load times.
Take advantage of a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) – also called a content distribution network – is a network of servers which may help in improving page loading speed. It does so by hosting and delivering your site’s static content from servers spread out all across the globe.
A CDN will work with your host and not take its place and in addition to the server hosting your primary website, you can also leverage a content distribution network or CDN to distribute copies of your website’s content among select data centres.
This helps to maximise performance by cutting down the distance data requests must travel between different browsers and the host’s servers. This helps reduce latency and cut down your TTFB (time to first byte).
Get rid of unnecessary plugins
Plugins are great, you need them, sure – but not all are created equal. Too many plugins on your site can bog down page performance. Moreover, plugins which are outdated or not well-maintained may pose a security threat, introducing compatibility issues in some cases which adversely affect performance.
Do a quick sweep and disable and/or delete the plugins you don’t need. Plus, you should review the installed plugins to determine if you actually need them. Some plugins even have overlapping features, so you’d want to disable/delete the ones which are not fully fit for purpose.
Performance-optimised hosting solution
The hosting provider you choose can drastically affect your website’s overall management and performance – and this includes page load speeds, of course.
One of the worst mistakes businesses tend to make is to go for an average hosting solution to save on the monthly rate.
More often than not, cheap hosting means lacklustre performance. It also means having to share resources with other websites on the same server, and chances are that server is overloaded already – which can severely strain your page loading speeds.
Our team of website builders and developers can help you find the best hosting solution according to your budget and performance needs.
While the above are some common ways of improving page load speeds, there’s a lot more you can do (and should be doing) to ensure that your pages pop up in front of your prospects within milliseconds. Talk to us now for a free initial consultation.
