As you know, website speed plays a vital role in ensuring visitor retention, customer purchases, and mobile site responsiveness. With Google changing its algorithm on a regular basis, doing what you can to keep up the speed of your website is more important than ever.
If your website takes too long to load, you’ll lose visitors, influence and sales. Thankfully, small changes like content-caching, utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and hosting your website on a scalable infrastructure like a hosted private cloud can help. So, tune up your website now with these tips from cloud-computing company SingleHop.
There's Even More You Can Do
The suggestions in this Infographic are not difficult to implement and you're likely to see the benefits of these changes fairly quickly. But, don't stop here. There are many other things you can do to improve your website's speed. Four suggestions we've implemented ourselves include:
- Caching - it's easy and important, especially if your website is built on the WordPress platform
- Image optimization takes little time but has huge benefits. Most people have no idea they are uploading 4MB images when 150KB images will do.
- Including less javascript and plugins on your website will do wonders to improve the speed.
- Absolutely no Flash. This goes without saying, but it's worth saying if only to reinforce how important this advice is.
Take a few minutes and test the speed of your website before you implement any of the suggestions we've made. This will give you that all-important benchmark you can use when you test your website after making some changes. There are many tools you can use to test your website's speed. One that we have used is Pingdom. Pingdom is easy to use. Just visit the site and paste your website's URL into the test box and click “Test Now.”
Understanding how your website is performing is critical to your business' success. The Internet is vital to every business today. Purchase decisions are made after consumers visit any number of websites and do their due diligence. Optimizing your website and tuning it up for speed is sure to result in increased traffic and revenue growth.
What are you doing to speed up your website? Share your tips with us in the Comments below.
