Our Guide To Increase Your Website Speed Optimization – Complete Guide

Amir Fereydoonkhan - June 30, 2023September 27, 2023

Getting more leads attracted to your business is likely when your website is optimised to meet user needs. Boosting your business website speed is step one in getting more leads and converting these leads into paying customers. Designing an effective website with speed in mind is crucial–the longer it takes for your site to load, the likelier it is that users will ditch your page before seeing any of its content.

The probability of a customer bouncing increases 32 percent as load time goes from one to three seconds, making site speed one of the most important factors to online success. Despite the importance of website speed optimization, too many businesses don’t take the time to optimise their site design for an improved site experience. This article will help you tackle slow loading times and reach more leads by exploring the benefits of site speed optimization and the best practices to attract more traffic to your business. Let’s get started!

The Benefits of Website Speed Optimization

Website and page speed optimization have several advantages, especially for businesses looking to attract more customers by providing a satisfactory online experience. Below are some of the benefits you can unlock by optimising your website for speed.

Enhances User Experience

Increasing your website speed optimization will cause faster load times, resulting in a better user experience and making users more likely to engage with your content. Enhancing the user experience is essential to boost overall user satisfaction, foster trust between users and the site, and boost the likelihood of users returning to your site. A slow website will frustrate users, leading them to abandon your page and seek information, products, and services from your competitors.

Impacts Your SEO

Keywords aren’t the only factor that impacts your search engine optimization (SEO). Your site speed plays a significant role in determining how you rank in search engines like Google. Faster-loading websites are likely to rank higher in results pages because search engine algorithms prioritise fast and efficient results for users.

An efficient loading time proves your legitimacy to search engine algorithms, giving you a better chance of appearing high in results lists while increasing your visibility, generating organic traffic, and opening the door for potential business opportunities.

Lowers Your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. The slower your page loading times, the higher your bounce rate becomes, and the less legitimacy your brand has in the eyes of search engines and consumers. High bounce rates indicate visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for or having a poor experience with your website.

Without site speed optimization, users will lose patience and leave before they’ve explored your content thoroughly. By optimising your content for speed, you can increase the chances of site visitors exploring multiple pages, engaging with your content, and purchasing or subscribing to your offerings.

Improves Your Conversion Rate

Site loading time can influence your customer conversion rates. Because a faster site loading time encourages users to stay on your website longer and explore different offerings, users will likely engage and purchase from your site. Ultimately, loading time likely plays a much more critical role in your company’s success than you imagine.

Best Practices to Enhance Website Speed

Website performance optimization can make or break your site’s success and your ability to attract your target audience. Though it’s undoubtedly essential to improve website performance capabilities, you may question how to optimise website speed to attract more visitors and convince them to engage with your offerings. Here are some of our top suggestions to optimise your website’s speed and reach untapped audiences with your content.

Optimise Images

Optimising image sizes should be one of the first steps to improve your website speed. Most websites incorporate images into content frequently. While images are crucial to keeping your site visitors engaged with your offerings, images that aren’t compressed or with too high of a resolution can harm your website’s performance.

Neglecting to consider image resolution means that only a few online visitors can navigate your website without slow loading times. You waste bandwidth by leaving your images as they are and creating an unappealing user environment.

Enable Browser Caching

Caching is essential for optimising your website speed and a crucial factor for web performance best practices. Caching involves saving versions of your files in a storage location known as a cache. Caching your files lowers bandwidth consumption and can significantly improve your loading speed.

Browser caching enables your browser to store essential information and present this information to avoid reloading the information every time a user visits the website. This process optimises page loading speeds to ensure visitors have a pleasant experience with your website and return to your content in the future.

Lower the Number of Plugins

While plugins provide essential functionality and features for many websites, the more plugins your site uses, the slower it loads and the more resources are necessary to operate. As you adopt more plugins to suit your evolving needs, take inventory and consider which plugins you no longer need to make your website design what you want. Aim only to keep necessary plugins that contribute to your site’s functioning and eliminate unnecessary plugins to optimise the user experience.

Get Rid of Redirects

Whenever a page redirects to another location, the HTTP request becomes more extended, and the loading response becomes more tedious for the average user. Eliminating page redirects when they aren’t necessary to guide users throughout your website is crucial and will significantly improve your page loading times for a more enjoyable user experience.

Though redirects are sometimes necessary–such as when you’ve just switched to a new domain and need to direct users to your new website–they are often unnecessary and only deter potential customers from your offerings. Do your best to avoid creating redirects when you’re link-building, and take note of any misplaced redirects on your site.

Minify Your Files

Minifying your files involves optimising your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML code by eliminating or shortening any symbols in the file’s source code. These symbols could include unnecessary characters, spaces, comments, and other details that increase the file size and contribute to slow loading times, causing users to leave your website before exploring further.

Once you’ve minified CSS and JavaScript files, you can combine files into bundles for better code and faster page loading speeds to enhance user satisfaction. The smaller the file size, the more effectively and efficiently your site can load and give users a memorable experience.

Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) can significantly increase your website speed and optimise your content for a better user experience. A CDN is a set of site servers that increase page loading speed by hosting copies of your website content from distributed, global web servers.

Hosting your website on a single server means that all visitor requests are sent to a single hardware location rather than multiple servers, increasing the time to process individual requests. CDNs direct site users to the nearest geographical site server, meaning your content reaches users efficiently.

Optimise Your Hosting Solution

Your site loading speeds might be low because of your current hosting solution. If you aren’t sure how to improve website performance, reassess your current host. While shared hosting services are popular because they are the most affordable way to host your website, these aren’t usually the most efficient and will likely cause slower loading times and higher bounce rates.

Rather than shared serving, where you share resources of a specific server with others, consider the following options:

• Virtual Private Servers (VPS): a VPS uses multiple server machines rather than a single machine like shared servers

• Dedicated: a dedicated server involves a single server machine that you rent while a system administrator maintains the server

• Serverless: serverless hosting removes the need for maintenance and setup procedures, making it an innovative option for many site owners

Improve Your Website Performance With Digital8

Website speed optimization is crucial to succeeding in the online market, and without taking proper steps to optimise your site speed, users will likely turn away from your content in favour of your competitors. A well-designed website is the first step to making a name for yourself and your company online, and by prioritising your site speed, you can access benefits including an enhanced user experience, improved SEO and higher search engine rankings, lowered bounce rate, and a higher conversion rate.

Digital8 has all the resources you need to thrive in your market and reach an online audience that engages with your content. Converting site visitors into paying customers is possible with expert design guidance from Digital8. As a leading web design agency, Digital8 ensures that all of your website needs are met so you can provide visitors with the best user experience possible.

Finding success with your website is possible when you work with Digital8. Contact Digital8 today to start optimising your site design and converting more leads.