How To Speed Up Your Website
We’re all very busy – modern life seems to move at an ever-increasing speed. The internet is often seen as part of this trend – an information superhighway that facilitates a quicker pace of life. We access websites for convenience – and expect them to load swiftly and smoothly.
The truth is, however, that like anything else websites can slow down over time. For various reasons, load times can lag. The experience of using a slow website can be frustrating – and always contributes to a high “bounce rate” (the rate of people leaving your site after just a few seconds).
If your website is slow, it will fail to engage users, who demand a seamless experience online. If it fails to engage users, it will fail to represent your business appropriately – and convert users to buyers.
The good news is that there are several techniques that can speed up your website again and make it more enjoyable to use. Ensuring that the experience of visiting and browsing your website is pleasant and pain-free is key to making good on the investment you’ve made in building a website in the process.
So what are those tools? The first is simple: upgrade your hosting. We’ve blogged about this issue before, but essentially cheaper hosting packages store your website alongside many others – giving each less bandwidth to play with, and therefore making all more prone to slowing down. A better hosting package will give your site more headroom to handle higher traffic volumes.
Similarly, you should choose a fast Content Management System (CMS). These are “back doors” to your site which enable you to keep the text, images and other content elements of your site up-to-date. The faster this system works, the quicker your site will be able to compile all those elements – and display them to your users.
Content has other implications, too: you should optimise your images (that is, compress them for use on the web) so that they load more quickly; you should also host only the number of files you need – the more you have, the slower your website will become. Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – these save images and pages to different servers around the world, meaning users will load content from the nearest server, saving significantly on loading times.
In short, you don’t have to stick with a slow website anymore than your users do. Talk to us here at Image+ about how to speed up your website.
Contact Image Plus for Web Design & Development
If you need web design or development, then speak to our friendly experts. Our web developers are based in Coventry, Warwickshire and are always ready to help. Please feel free to contact us and speak to one of our website design specialists.
Contact us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
