Guide to Optimizing Website Loading Speed

Internet users are not tolerant enough these days to wait more than a couple of seconds for a website to respond or a webpage to load completely and so do the crawler bots! That’s why the website loading speed is one of the key factors that is highly effective on how Google or other major search engines rank a website on their result page. 

As such, even if your website is built by the best web design company in Dubai, don’t forget to optimize your website speed and check it regularly to make sure that it’s performing as expected. 

Here are some tips and methods to improve your website loading speed.

• Optimize your images and visual content

Images and visualized content are crucial for a better user experience. However, as we already know, images and photos are heavy in size. Therefore, it puts additional pressure on your server and makes your website loading speed slower. Hence, you must make sure to optimize your visual content including images for size without sacrificing the quality. There are great free online tools like Optimizilla that perfectly do the job for you.

• Choose a high performance hosting service provider

Your host service provider plays a pivotal role on your website performance and speed. If you are using a shared server hosting service, you will be experiencing some poor loading speed at some point in time. It is recommended to use a VPS or dedicated server, if you are running a mega website with multiple pages and many visual content like ecommerce. As the ecommerce website cost in UAE is high to build, it is highly recommended to pay for a dedicated server to not fall behind your competitors due to your poor website speed.

• Use CDN ( Content Delivery Network)

CDN or Content Delivery Network is a very effective solution for online businesses who are operating within a wide geographical area or globally. By utilizing CDN, the traffic will be spread out across multiple servers which are located across different geographical areas. By doing so, the request from a user who is far from the website server will be redirected to a server close to the user’s area. CDN enhances the loading speed significantly. 

• Use redirects as less as possible

The more redirects you use on your website the slower loading time is expected. Even though redirects are needed to be in place within your website, try to minimize the number of redirects, as it prolongs the HTTP request. Therefore, you must make sure to get rid of unnecessary redirects in order to improve your webpages loading speed. 

•  Minify CSS and JavaScript files

Minifying CSS and JS files refers to optimizing the code by removing all unnecessary spaces and comments in order to minimize the file size. Minimizing CSS and JS files by optimizing the codes and combining them if possible, helps your website to load faster. Well-educated and experienced developers are capable of creating clean and summarized code. However, there are free WP plugins like Autoptimize that can perfectly do the job for you. 

• Get rid of unnecessary plugins

Having many plugins on your WP website will negatively impact your website speed. Even though there are some plugins that are needed to be in place, you must be careful of overusing multiple plugins to avoid a negative impact on your website loading speed. Therefore, go through all your plugins and disable/delete all unnecessary plugins. That would significantly improve your website speed. 

• Enable website caching

By enabling website caching, the current version of your webpages will remain on the host server and doesn’t need to reload every time users visit a webpage. If you are using WP as your website content management system, you can use W3 Total cache plugin, for caching your website. 

• Limit the usage of Web Fonts

Even though web fonts are becoming very popular, the truth is that they have a negative impact on website speed, as it increases the number of HTTP requests. If you need to use them, you must be careful to limit the usage of web fonts as much as you can.

Summary

It is crucial for your website to perform healthy in all aspects. Your website loading speed is a game changing factor that can improve your website rank on major search engines and direct more traffic and improve conversion rate. There are quite a few methods to improve your website loading speed that we have gone through already in this article. Also, some other minor tips like claiming your business on Google would help. By doing so,  users who are only after your business contact details or address, will view it on Google result page and no entry into your website is required. If you want to know how to claim Google business, follow the link for a detailed and comprehensive guideline.