Ten Tips for Speeding Up Your Website’s Loading Time
Boost your website’s loading time for high conversion rates and best SEO practices!
Learn how to optimize your website and improve its performance to maintain high conversion rates and best SEO practices.
Learn how fast-loading web pages is significant in retaining visitors, which ultimately gives your website the traffic that it deserves.



Source: Buildinary

As a website’s loading speed is directly responsible for a good user experience, it is crucial from an SEO standpoint. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, it is estimated that around 40% of the visitors abandon the website. Moreover, as Google tends to list high-performing websites on the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), having a slow-loading website automatically leads to poor SEO practices. It minimizes the chances of it ranking high.

Why Does a Website’s Loading Speed Matter?

In total, four factors connect a page’s load speed to its success. These are:

● Conversion Rate: A website’s speed affects the conversion rate; most users tend to stay on fast-loading sites, and hence, they convert at higher rates.

Mobify: Mobify decreased its load time by 100 milliseconds and found a 1.11% increase in its session-based conversion.

Retailer AutoAnything: Its sales increased by 12-13% after the page’s load time was decreased by 50%.

Walmart: Improving Walmart’s page load time by 1 second increased its conversion rate by 2%.

● Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave the website after scrolling through only one page in case the page does not load fast. BBC lost 10% of its users because of its slow page load time.

Source: Website Builder Expert

● SEO: A website’s loading speed is important for SEO to rank high on SERPs. This can be determined by Google’s Core Web Vitals, which measure a user’s experience in loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures a website’s loading performance and should occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page-load time.

● User Experience: A bad user experience is directly proportional to long page load time and provokes users to abandon the page, resulting in low conversion rates.

How to Measure Your Current Website Speed?

To measure a website’s loading speed, you can use various website speed test tools. Some recommendations are as follows:

●Google PageSpeed Insights: It scores your website’s speed on a scale of 0-100 and measures your website against Google’s Core Web Vitals.

●Pingdom: Pingdom tests your website based on location and provides insights on page load time.

●GTMetrix: GTMetrix provides a speed visualization displaying your page load in a timeline and shows the loading time of each object on your website.



It is essential to benchmark your website’s performance to understand where you stand against your major competitors. Benchmarking helps in obtaining industry-level standards and identifying the areas that require improvement for the overall development of the website.

Can Large or Unoptimized Images Slow Down Website Speed?

Yes, large images slow down a website’s speed and cause you to lose traffic. Images with unspecific dimensions and heavy formats such as TIFF and BMP also slow down a website.
Hence, compressing images and choosing the right image format is of vital importance for less load time and high conversion rates. Images should be in JPG file format, and compression can be done via tools like TinyImage, Uploadcare, Adobe Photoshop, and ImageOptim.

Source: Uploadcare

Minimizing HTTP Requests

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a method in which information is encoded and transported between a client device and a web server. When a user visits a website, the images on that page are loaded via HTTP requests. The more the requests, the longer the load time. Hence, it is of utmost importance that HTTP requests should be minimized. It can be done by:

• Deleting unnecessary and large images
• Implementing the Lazy Loading technique
• Minifying unnecessary codes from CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
• Combining all the CSS and JavaScript files separately to reduce HTTP requests

Another way to speed up browsing is by browser caching. Browser caching involves loading the website’s resources from the cache instead of relying on the network, thereby increasing the loading speed.
To enable browser caching, configure your web server so that the correct headers are sent to the browser. Depending on the type of server you use, you can use different methods such as editing the. htaccess file, the web. config file, or the nginx.

Utilizing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are groups of servers that are geographically distributed, and they cache content to users. CDN helps to quickly transfer assets that are required for loading internet content, including HTML pages, images, videos, JavaScript files, and stylesheets.

CDN helps in:

• Improving a website’s load time.
• Reducing bandwidth costs through caching.
• Increasing content availability
• Improving website security

Some of the best CDN services you can use in 2023 are bunny.net, Google Cloud CDN, CloudFront, and Gcore CDN.

Optimizing Your Website’s Code

Bulky codes slow a website’s speed, driving away visitors and severely impacting SEO. The easiest way to optimize website codes is by cleaning up HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for better performance. This can be done by:

• Clearing the whitespace
• Cutting back on inline styles
• Condensing stylesheets
• Cleaning up excess HTML code
• Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Another way to improve a website’s speed is by minimizing HTTP redirects from one URL to another, thereby minimizing hindrances and saving the wait time of the users.

Mobile Optimization

Most traffic on a website comes from mobile devices, hence the need for mobile optimization. This improves website speed and user experience and is crucial for SEO. Mobile optimization can be done in the following ways:

• Using responsive designs and testing the website on multiple devices
• Optimizing image sizes
• Simplifying navigation processes for better browsing experiences

In 2018, Google announced that they were switching to the mobile-first index, making it the primary version of the website and co-relating it to its ranking in the search results.



Source: Website Builder Expert

Updating and Monitoring Your Website

To ensure that your website achieves the desired traffic and conversion rates, website maintenance is of utmost importance. This includes monitoring the web traffic, updating content, sustaining security, and boosting website speed. Some tools for monitoring website loading time are Uptrends, Dotcom-Monitor, Sematext, and Domsignal.



Source: Uptrends

Besides this, keeping your website’s software and plugins up to date is also beneficial. This provides website security, bug-free experience, and faster load time.
Moreover, having a Responsive Website Design (RWD) framework allows websites to adapt and display themselves on all types of devices. The average screen size for web design includes:

• Desktop-screens: 1024×768 to 1920×1080
• Mobile Devices: 360×640 to 414×896

Hence, this screen size’s responsive design directly benefits the performance of websites, resulting in fulfilling user experiences. The best tools available for responsive web design are Webflow, Simbla, and Gator Website Builder. Amongst these, Webflow responsive design is such that it lets the user adhere to the visual components while it handles the technical side.
Moreover, testing the responsiveness of a website gives an understanding of the website’s performance, and specific tools like Emulators, ViewPort Resizer, and Screenfly can help a user to do so.

Source: ConstantContact


A good functioning website is the core of any business. Hence, keeping your website loading speed low and maintaining its overall performance is the critical factor that drives good user experiences and lowers bounce rates, ultimately contributing to the best SEO practices. So, whether you have an old or a new website, use the above tricks and tips to give your audience the experience of a lifetime!
Ready for high-performance pages with maximum conversion rates? Speed up your website today!

FAQs

1. What is a good website speed?

• Although it has no fixed answers, a good website speed is 2 seconds or less.

2. Why should website speed be increased?

• Website speed should be increased to give the audience a user-friendly experience, boosting conversion rates and improving SEO practices.

3. What affects a website’s load time?

• A website’s loading time is affected by the web page design, the number of elements on the page, the amount of bandwidth in transit, the user’s device, location, and browser.

4. Is website speed important for SEO?

• Yes, a website’s speed is a vital factor in deciding how high the site will be ranked on search engine results pages (SERPs). The slower the website loads, the less likely it will show up on top of the SERPs.