Rankwinz

Five Paths to Speed Up Your Website

You won’t find a single user who likes to wait. That is why you need to have a fast website that would load the necessary information in not more than 5 seconds.

Everybody hates to wait. Search engines hate that, too. Thus you have to make your website as fast as lightning and everybody will love you.

The Importance of Page Speed

Some recent researches show that average page speed for top retail websites was over seven seconds, three seconds above the ideal speed. But, this difference of three seconds costs retailers billions. Also, it has been shown that a single second delay in page load may cause a 7% drop in sales. Besides causing income loss, page speed can also seriously affect rankings.

Here are several steps to increase page speed.

1. Tracking Codes, Video Embeds and Share Buttons

You don’t need several analytics programs anymore. Given tracking codes are essential for analyzing the way users behave, it would be ideal if marketers review each analytics program in order to choose the one which is necessary.

When you add another tracking code to your page, it loses speed. Hence, make sure your tracking code is placed at the bottom of your page. As a result, the page will be displayed even if the code hasn’t been loaded yet.

Also, it would be better if you limit the use of video embeds. Obviously videos play in important role in building consumer engagement, but most video embeds use iFrames for displaying videos. iFrames seriously affect the speed of your page.

Regarding the share buttons, the same situation is brought about. They are important for increasing referral traffic and reach customers. However, share buttons are javascript-based and javascript forms iFrames. Thus, you should also limit the number of share buttons.

2. Database Optimization

Databases are used to store information. It doesn’t matter whether you have a blog, e-commerce shop, news website or any other type of business, you are using a database. And this database also influences the page speed.

The best way to optimize your database and improve page speed is to add an index. With the help of this index your database will find the information much faster. Instead of scanning huge amounts of records, the database will focus on an index in order to narrow the data. This will make the data return to the page much faster.

3. CDN

Let’s imagine the physical location of the server of your website is in Texas. Obviously the website would load quickly for residents there because there is a short distance to travel. But, if a user who wants to visit your website is in Paris, the data has to travel from Texas to France, stopping at many routers. This delay is added to every single image, video, CSS file, javascript, etc.

What if your page has a copy in a server both in Texas and Paris? Sounds great! This is the purpose of a CDN (Content Delivery Networks). It has servers all over the world and they can store a copy of your website.

4. Use Caching

If a user visits a webpage for the first time, the browser will request all the images, scripts, and texts from the server. They all are stored in the browser’s cache so that when you go to other pages, only parts of it should be downloaded which are unique.

5. Page Speed Tool

Due to the fact that today we have access to PageSpeed Insights, it is easy to analyze the speed of a certain URL and get tips on how to produce improvement. It is worth using PageSpeed Insights because it in such a way your will be able to see what Google sees.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/