There's no doubt that page load speeds have a major impact on how, or even if, we do business online. Three major facts about this will give any webmaster pause:
- Google uses this as a ranking factor for your page.
- Humans currently have an attention span of 8 seconds, one second less than a goldfish.
- The average retail web page can take over 7 seconds to load. It's been documented that a delay as small as one second can cost you a huge 7% hit in your conversion rates.
With these reasons and many others, it's high time we take this seriously. Let's take a look at 5 ways you can get your pages to come up faster.
5 Tips for reducing your page load time
Google PageSpeed Insights – Google provides a free solution for locating a lot of the issues you might be facing with regards to slow loading pages. It's called PageSpeed Insights, and it's free. It will see why your pages aren't arriving quickly and suggest ways to fix that.
Not too many redirects – Too many redirects on your pages can cause the server to make extra http requests it doesn't need to. Make sure you don't have any faulty, old, or otherwise unneeded redirects clogging up the arteries.
Unplug some plugins – You might have far too many plugins, and some of them may be gumming up the works when it comes to having your pages load quickly. Eliminate any you aren't using, and test the ones you are to determine if they are optimized well. (Are they making your pages slow down)
Be sure to optimize your images – Images can have a large effect on your page load speeds, and to make the best of this try not to have too many on a single page, use JPEGs if at all possible, and compress them as small as is feasible.
Compress your pages – Enabling compression on your pages can help them load an amazing 70% faster. If you aren't handy with code, there is a tool named Gzip which will do the work for you. This alone can make a big difference in how fast your page loads.