4 Website Optimization Secrets You Need to Know

Posted: October 21st, 2019 / Author: fiksie

The speed of your website is essential, as it is the first impression of your business. And when it comes to user experience, your chances of getting a second chance are low. Having a low website speed is a frustrating thing that keeps people from visiting your site.

A high-performance site does not only give high return visits, but it also provides you with lower bounce rates and higher conversions. In addition, it allows your site to give better user experience and, thus, rank higher in organic search.

Fortunately, there are tons of ways to optimize the speed of your site. And yes, we have created a list of the most effective ones. They are detailed below:

#1. Move Your Site To a Better Host

As you may have already known, there are three types of hosting: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting.

The most popular among these three is definitely shared hosting, especially since it is the cheapest way to get your site online in a short period of time.

However, since the server you are using is shared with other website owners, the speed of your site is always affected. With dedicated hosting, the server is yours only, although this is ideal for this with advanced web development knowledge.

Virtual Private Servers, on the other hand, is arguably much faster. It basically uses various servers when it comes to content distribution. With a VPS server, you still share it with other users and have your own portion of the said server.

The latter, in particular, is where you can perform configurations without the worry of influencing other users. If your site tends to experience traffic spikes, you might find VPS an optimal solution.

#2. Consider Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN refers to a set of web servers distributed across multiple geographical locations, all of which provide web content to end users with regard to their respective location. Remember that when you host your site on a single server, all user requests are expected to be sent to the same hardware.

As such, time is required in order to process each of these requests. Mind you, this can request over time as well.

With a CDN, however, a better process of handling user requests is provided. Basically, user requests are rather redirected to the closest server. Due to this, the content delivery becomes much quicker and your website works faster.

Sure, it may require you to spend a bit of fortune, but, in return, you get to have an effective way of optimizing your site’s load time.

#3. Website optimization by reducing Size of Images

There is no doubt that everyone loves eye-catching images.

There is just something in them that catches the attention of people. For this reason, images have become an integral element in the success of a website. For instance, you own an e-commerce site and it comes with tons of photos and/or graphics of your product pages. Thanks to them, you get to increase your engagement rate significantly.

However, they are also one of the reasons why websites tend to load a bit slower than usual. Since they are larger files, they can easily slow down a website.

This is why you need to consider optimizing the size of images on your website. The best way to do it is to reduce their size without the need to compromise quality, something that can be done by compressing using tools like Kraken or JPEGmini.

Keep in mind, though, that the overall procedure can be really time-consuming. This is most especially the case if you need to upload a handful of images. But hey, it is totally worth it!

#4. Reduce the Number of Plugins

Plugins are absolutely common components of a website. They bring tons of functionalities and/or features that are essential to the overall success of your site. Apparently, having more plugins installed on your site is not a good idea. Why exactly?

Well, that is because they can result in a lower performance of your website. The more they are, the more resources your site requires to run them. As a result, your site works slower and, worse, security issues can instantly appear.

As time goes by, the number of plugins grows, but you might find some of them useless. So, in a sense, it is imperative that check all plugins you installed and remove unnecessary ones.

You can run a performance test, so you can pinpoint which plugins are dragging your website down. A general rule of thumb is to avoid using plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles, especially if they tend to generate a lot of database queries.

Your best course of action is to keep the best ones and make sure that they are updated.