See How You Can Vastly Improve Your Page Load Speeds
If one of your goals is to best optimize your site for search, then you might be aware of the importance placed on having your page load quickly. There are a number of good reasons why you'll want to make sure this is so, among them are:
- 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 whopping 7% hit in your conversion rates.
With these reasons and many others, it's high time we take this seriously. Let's look at 5 ways you can get your pages to come up faster.
5 Tips for reducing your page load time
Google PageSpeed Insights – A major ranking factor, the speed at which your pages load is in fact super easy and free to check. Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights which grades your page and suggest fixes you can make to make things quicker, and it works on both desktop and mobile.
Limit redirects – Be sure you don't have more redirects than you actually need, because they are prone to causing pages to load slower due to more http requests. You'll require some for your responsive mobile version of your site, so don't eliminate those!
Reduce the number of plugins – Undoubtedly we are plugin fiends, but this can have a adverse effect on page loads. You should definitely get rid of plugins you don't actually need. If you suspect other plugins, you can try deactivating to check out what the page load speeds are without them, and act accordingly.
Optimize images – Take the time to make sure that your images are compressed to the smallest size possible, and that you are using JPEGs whenever you can. Also make sure that you remove image comments.
Enable page compression – Enabling compression on your pages, thereby reducing their size and allowing them to be loaded far faster is a really good idea. This is best accomplished with a tool called Gzip, and can result in page loads 70% faster!
