In the mobile-first era, not having a lightning-fast website means losing out on search engine rankings and potential business. That’s because users don’t have the time or patience for a slow-loading website. Plus, since there are alternatives for almost every website, you can’t afford to disappoint your users. In most cases, webmasters unknowingly bulk up their website, and by undoing that, you can considerably improve your page load speed.
According to a study conducted by Amazon, the eCommerce giant claims to lose one percent of its revenues for every second of delay in page loading. While the industry leaders are so focused on improving their page speed, regular websites simply cannot ignore this criterion. So, unless you have a website that loads in less than 3 seconds, you are in for some serious trouble. This could happen due to a score of reasons, and with some quick measures in place, you can easily speed up your website and keep it secure. So, let us now discuss some quick tips that can help you achieve this goal in no time.
1. Secure Your Website with a Wildcard SSL Certificate
Wildcard SSL certificates have gained prominence ever since Security Socket Layer (SSL) certificates have been recognized as a ranking signal by Google. However, most people don’t realize its actual benefits. These helps protect your data and enable secure file transfers. However, as you can use only one per domain, you may want to consider a Wildcard SSL certificate.
A Wildcard SSL certificate can be used on multiple subdomains and helps bring down the overall SSL costs. Further, not only does it keep your website secure, but also boosts your website’s SEO rankings. Use of SSL on your website is good practice. Google has recently disclosed that a website’s security would play a pivotal role in its rankings. So, don’t think twice before going HTTPS with a Wildcard SSL certificate to cocoon your website.
2. Optimize your Images
A picture speaks a thousand words, and that’s true, but if you post too many of them, then that could very well mess up your page load time. So, to fix that you can reduce the size of your images through certain websites like tinypng. Alternately, if you have a WordPress website, you can download and install free image optimizing plugins like Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer. These plugins help reduce the size of the image, and that in turn speeds up your website.
3. Invest in the right web hosting
Not many people are aware of how shared web hosting can ruin their website. Since there is very little transparency when it comes to the allocation of the server’s resources, shifting to VPS web hosting is a better option. More so, because it gives you better clarity about your share of the Server’s resources. Based on that, you can devise the right content strategy and that should considerably speed up your website.
4. Get rid of unwanted plugins
If you use WordPress like most other websites do, then you probably have a plug-in for the Parallax, one for the Jumbotron, and one for SEO and so on. Did you ever realize that with each of these plug-ins, you are further bulking up your website, besides exposing it to potential cyber threats? Every plugin is a bunch of code and when you install it, you are adding that to your website. So, an easy way to minimize them would be by making use of a WordPress theme that has it all. Of course, you would have to download the SEO plugin, but by picking the right theme you at least do away with the need to download and install design elements through plugins.
5. Use CDN
One of the major reasons for slow website is the geographic distance between the client-server and the server that is hosting the website. You can easily resolve this problem by hiring the services of a content delivery network (CDN) service provider. The CDN literally takes a copy of your website and puts it on various servers across the globe. So, if your website is hosted in Tampa, but is accessed in Melbourne, then the client-server gains access to the nearest one to Melbourne. Now that eliminates the lag caused due to distance and speeds up the entire process.
6. Minify your code
Depending on the architecture of your website, minifying your code can speed up your website, drastically. Usually the minifier eliminates unwanted elements such as spaces, formatting and redundant code. By eliminating all of that from your website, you remove the extra characters and make the code smaller, lighter and faster. To do this, you need to choose the right tool based on which code you wish to minify.
- For HTML
- For CSS
- For JavaScript
7. Use a Minimalistic Design
Most website owners spend a lot of time on the countless design elements, which eventually increase the website’s page load time. So, unless you are running a website that needs to be graphically rich like Pexels or Pixabay, we recommend that you keep the design as minimalistic as you can. If you use WordPress, you can do this by using Elementor or one of the basic WordPress themes. Just make sure to use a design that’s responsive and loads fast on all devices.
A slow website almost always results in a higher bounce rate because most users would simply move on to another site if yours does not load fast. Now that further hampers your SEO rankings because the bounce rate tells Google that people don’t like your content. So, unless you speed up your website, the vicious cycle of adverse consequences goes on and on. So, we recommend that you start speeding up and securing your website with a Wildcard SSL certificate and then implement the above-listed suggestions. Remember to check your website’s speed, both before and after incorporating those measures. This would indicate the difference quite clearly and you would be able to notice it yourself.
