14 Amazing Techniques to Increase your Website Speed in 2023
Last Updated on 11th March 2023 by Ajmer Singh
What will you do if the website you are surfing is taking too much time to load?
Stay and wait patiently for the site to open or leave the page.
Most people will leave the page and go to some other site that will load quickly.
If you want to increase your website traffic and sales, you need to increase the speed of your website.
A slow website is as good as no website. People on the internet are very impatient.
They won’t even wait a few seconds for the website to load unless it is important.
Here are some statistics to prove the importance of a high-speed website.
Website loading delay leads to,
- A decrease in page views by 11%
- The decrease in customer satisfaction by 16%
- A decrease in conversions by 7%
So if you don’t want to lose visitors or customers make sure your website loads in lesser time.
Here is how your website speed is rated.
Website speed rating:
- Less than one second = Excellent
- 1 to 3 seconds = Good
- 3 to 7 seconds = Average
- More than 7 seconds = Poor
This rating was given by customers who like to make online purchases.
Now, if you have an e-commerce website, make sure it is fast and loads quickly to avoid losing potential customers.
The speed of your website is directly related to two important factors,
- Visibility
- Conversions
Let’s see how speed affects these factors.
Website Speed and Visibility:
The most famous search engine Google ranks the sites on the basis of speed.
If your website is super-fast, it will appear on top of the search results. But if it’s slow, nobody will find your website.
Now, people are using their smartphones to search for everything instead of the desktop.
Because of this Google considers the time your website takes to load on a mobile platform.
So if your website loads really fast on the desktop but perform poorly on mobile, your site will naturally be ranked low.
In order to appear on the top, you need to enhance the mobile user’s experience.
So make sure your site works well on the mobile platform.
Website Speed and Conversions:
The speed of your website is directly related to conversions. If your site doesn’t load in 2 seconds are less, you will lose customers.
Let’s take the example of Walmart. We all know what Walmart is.
After they increased their website speed, their conversion rate increased as well as revenue.
- 1 second load time increase = 2% conversions
- 100 milliseconds speed improvement = 1% revenue
So this proves that customers choose only fast-working sites to make purchases.
If your site takes even 1 extra second to load, your conversion rate will drop by 25%.
What to do if your site is slow?
There are a number of steps you need to follow. The first step is to check the speed of your site.
Website Speed Test:
You need to test the speed of your site to know how much time it takes to load. It will give you a clear idea.
There are a number of reasons that make your site slow i.e. image size, redirects, etc.
Good Load time:
The next thing you need to know is, what the recommended load time is.
As per Google, the load time should be 3 seconds or less. However, a lot of websites are not even close to the mark.
Many websites take nearly 10 seconds to load. And mobile sites take 22 seconds to load fully. The customers won’t wait that long.
Make it fast:
The last and most important step is to make your website load quickly.
For this, you need to follow some tips and techniques.
You can easily increase the speed of your website by following these tips.
14 Amazing Techniques to Increase your Website Speed
If you are losing customers because of a slow website, we can help you.
In this post, we are going to discuss 20 amazing techniques you can use to increase the speed of your website.
Let’s get started.
1. Use a CDN:
CDN = Content Delivery Network. When you use CDN to host the files on your website, the speed naturally increases.
CDN hosts many servers around the world.
So if someone tries to access your site from Australia, the CDN will allow them to use the files from the closest server to them.
So instead of using a single server, you can use CDN which will host the site on many servers, thereby increasing the speed.
You will be able to save up to 60% bandwidth with CDN.
You can choose from different CDNs like Cloudflare, Cloudways, etc.
2. HTTP Requests:
You need to minimize the HTTP requests to make your website fast.
When someone tries accessing a website, most of the time is spent on loading images and other files on your website.
For each component, an HTTP request is made. This increases the overall loading time.
The more content on your website, the more time it will take to load fully.
First, you need to find out how many requests your site makes. You can use various tools to check it.
Once you know the number, minimize the contents accordingly to speed up your site.
However, some components are very important, if you remove them your site will look lousy. So do it with care.
3. Enable Compression:
You can enable GZIP compression to make your website fast.
When you use it, it will compress the files on your website to download them much faster.
A compressed file takes lesser time to load and download. Once the downloading is completed, it decompresses again.
4. Browser Caching:
When you use browser caching, the visitors who have already visited your site will be able to access it much faster.
This stores the element of your site in their browser.
So next time they visit your site, it will take less time because they have cached elements stored in their browser.
No HTTP request will be sent for loading those items.
You can use Cloudflare for this.
5. Minify Resources:
You can minimize the CSS or JavaScript files on your website.
When these files are minimized, unnecessary space is removed from the website.
It will take less time to download. You don’t have to do it yourself.
You can use various tools to do it. These tools will convert the file into a smaller version.
If you have a WordPress website, you can use plugins. Some plugins are W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket.
But I recommend using the Autoptimize plugin for minification of Java, CSS and HTML.
6. Media Files:
Media files take up a lot of time to load. If you have many files on your website, it will become slow.
You can optimize these files to increase the speed.
Media files, especially high-quality pictures and HD videos can take up a lot of space.
You can optimize these files to make them load faster.
- Image Files: Choose JPG file format and make sure the size is proper. Adjust the pixels and compress the image by using various tools like TinyJPG.
- Video Files: Choose MP4 video format. Adjust the size. Remove audio, if not required. Compress the file and reduce the length.
7. Clean up:
One very important thing you can do is clean up your database.
Over time the database gets filled with unnecessary files. This makes the website slow.
You need to clean up the database from time to time. It is like our mobile storage system.
You need to clean up to save memory. Once the memory is cleared, the speed will increase considerably.
Use the WP-Optimize plugin to optimize your database.
8. Server Response Time:
The server response time is the time taken by DNS lookup. DNS = Domain Name System. It is a database.
There are many IP addresses stored here along with hostnames. It helps you to get connected with the IP address of the typed URL.
If you want to visit a website, you type a URL. This URL will be then converted into IP address so that you can reach the site.
For example, if you want to visit the site, you will enter the URL i.e. jojo.com. Now your computer doesn’t know what the URL is.
Here, the DNS provider will lookup for an IP address related to that URL. It will then redirect you to that IP address and the site will be loaded.
So here the DNS lookup and provider are important in order for you to access the website quickly.
If the DNS provider is fast, the site will be loaded quickly. If it is slow, it will take time.
You can switch to a faster one to increase the server response time.
Good hosting will improve most of your speed optimization warnings.
We recommend cloudways – try their free trial. They don’t ask for credit card details for a free trial.
9. Defer JavaScript Loading:
It means stopping the loading of the JavaScript file to make the other files load first.
You can do it for large files to make the smaller files load faster.
You can use the WP Rocket plugin for your WordPress website. It works similarly.
10. Broken Links:
You need to fix all the broken links in order to make your site fast. Broken links often show 404 errors.
If you have several broken links, no one will visit your site.
It will also put a drain on loading the site. You need to fix it to increase the speed as well as visitors.
You can use several tools to identify a broken link.
11. Reduce Redirects:
Redirects always show 301 and redirect to another page. While it is better than broken links, it still takes up a lot of loading time.
You can use several tools online to identify redirects and fix them. Nobody likes to waste extra time on redirecting sites.
12. Reduce External Script:
You need to reduce all the external links that will make your website slow. CSS and JavaScript are the main cause of external links.
But there are several other third-party links that make your site slow.
These links add the request to slow down your site. You can identify these links using several tools and uninstall them to make the website fast.
13. Speed Monitoring:
Keep monitoring the speed to know if your website speed is fast or slow. This way you can always make changes to improve the speed.
It also helps you identify why the speed is slow or when the speed is slow. You can use appropriate techniques to improve speed.
The importance of website speed cannot be ignored. You can possibly run out of business if the speed is really slow.
To avoid this, you need to keep monitoring the speed of your website and take important steps to make it fast.
14. A well-coded Theme
Poorly coded themes will slow down your website speed due to their bloated features.
You have to select your theme properly.
I recommend Themify Ultra – the best, most flexible and multipurpose theme for WordPress.
How I can achieve 95+ scores in Gtmetrix, pagespeed insights & Pingdom?
I am using a combination of,
- Cloudways host
- Themify Ultra theme
- Autoptimize plugin for minification of Java, CSS & Html
- Wp Optimize plugin for database optimization
- Cloudflare CDN
And these are my results.
So, I hope now you understand how to increase your website speed.
A good web hosting provider and a well-coded theme will solve most of the things you need to increase your website speed.