Affordable web designers should know that a website’s page load time is crucial when it comes to acquiring new customers. According to Google, if your site takes more than three seconds to load, most of the visitors will leave it. Although there are tools to check the performance and load time of your site, it is important to know what affects the load time of your site. This way, you will be able to optimise your page accordingly.
Web hosting
No one would wish to wait for a website to load. Websites that load fast perform better in user engagement, user experience and conversion rates. Hence, it is essential to have a great hosting plan that ensures your website loads fast.
The size of your files
The speed of your pages depends on the size of your files loaded in the browser. It is good to have the optimum asset number with the least size possible. This requires lesser bandwidth and boosts the load time of your site.
The number of HTTP requests
A lot of HTTP requests from the browser to the server will cause your site to use a lot of bandwidth. Therefore, it is important to keep the HTTP requests to the minimum to increase the load time of your site.
Absence of CDN
You should use CDN to boost the performance of your site. The absence of CDN will affect your site’s load time. Web designers should therefore understand the usefulness of CDN. CDN is the content delivery distribution network and it is a network of servers and their data centres that are distributed across the globe to increase the availability and services to end users.
Poor coding
Bad coding affects the performance of your pages and the SEO ranking of the website. It is great to follow the best practices from the initial stage of web development to the end.
The number of redirections
The more the number of redirections, the more the load time of your site. If possible, avoid redirecting your pages.
Lack of keep-alive
This is another cause of a slow-loading website that can be fixed. If you are using the HTTP/1.0 protocol, you should configure the keep-alive to prevent your browser-server connection from breaking. This will lead to your pages not loading properly.
Hot linking
Sourcing your page content from another site might affect the performance and load time of your site.
Optimising your website
You can easily implement either a top-down or bottom-up strategy to optimise your website. However, optimising a website is an interactive process and there are a few things you can repeat after completing a cycle.
The first thing is for your affordable web designers to prepare a checklist of the possible strategies for the target website you wish to optimise. Then you should prioritise the checklist strategies and act on them. You should proceed to test the strategies for enhanced website performance and analyse the performance and impact of the website. You should then optimise for further enhancement and perform the cycle again.
