How fast your web pages load will determine the page bounce rate. The higher the bounce rates, the more business you will lose and the further your search engine ranking will decline.
Statistics show that a 1-second delay in the page load time leads to a 7% loss in conversion, a 16% decline in customer satisfaction, and 11% fewer page views. Amazon realized an increase in revenue of 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement. You should also try this strategy. The faster your pages load the better. The following tips will help boost the load speed of your pages.
Reduce HTTP requests
Yahoo reported that 80% of a web page’s load time is spent downloading pieces of the web page. The pieces include scripts, style sheets, images, Flash, and so on. To load up all these pieces, an HTTP request is usually made. The more requests that are needed, the longer it takes for a page to load/render. Simplifying your web design is the fastest way to boost page load speed. Reduce the number of elements on the web page, use CSS in place of images where possible, combine style-sheets into one, and reduce scripts.
Reduce the server response time
To boost the page speed, you should focus on a server response time of no more than 200 milliseconds. You can check for bottlenecks in the performance using web application monitoring solutions. You can evaluate the speed of your site using a tool like Yslow. You can also use the PageSpeed Tools by Google to understand performance best practices as well as automate the entire process.
Enable compression
Another ingenious method you can use to boost your page speed is to enable compression. Large pages are usually more than 100 kb in size. They are therefore bulky and take longer to load up. Zipping them using compression will boost the load speed. This is because compression helps reduce the bandwidth that is needed to load a page, thus minimizing HTTP response. For compression, you can use tools like Gzip. Don’t forget to set the server to allow compression.
Enable caching
When someone visits a web page, some of the elements of the website are stored on their hard drive in the cache. Temporary storage is very important in boosting the load speed. When trying to speed up the load speed of your pages, you should consider enabling browser caching. Loading a page that has been visited before will be faster after caching.
Optimize images
The size, format, and src attribute of images will impact the load speed of a page. Make sure you never use large images and rely on formats like JPEG, PNG, and GIFs. You have to stay away from TIFFs and BMPs. You must also use <img src=”…”> to keep the browser from making requests to the directory.
The above are the main things you should consider doing in your effort to boost the load speed. You should also consider optimizing CSS delivery, reducing the number of plugins on the website, and reducing redirects.
