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Do you know that 45% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than five seconds to load? They will be looking for an alternative which loads faster. Also, 60% of users expect that a website will be loaded completely within two or three seconds. So, if your site takes much time to load, most of users will abandon it. It makes sense to optimize and speed up your website.
More importantly, website load time is one of many factors that can help you get better positions in Google Search results. For example, if your site loads faster than your competitors, there would be a change that it will have a higher position than the other sites.
If you don’t know how many seconds does your site will take to load completely, then use PageSpeed Insights to check. Then, if it takes much time to load, you should start to optimize and speed it up immediately.
Tips To Optimize And Speed Up Your Website
Optimize and speed up your site will surely increase users satisfaction. More than that, users will spend more time on your website to read related stories, and so help your site reduces its bounce rate. Also, the chances that these users will return to your site higher. Like you and me, we won’t go back to a website that takes a lot of time to load, right?
So nothing is worse than a site with very very very high load time. In this article, I will show you a few tips to help you optimize and speed up the load time of your website. Check it out!
Select A Good Web Hosting That Helps Your Site Load Faster
When you start a new website, web hosting is the first thing you need to choose. Which one is good, affordable and stable? It’s a headache question, right?
I started my first website in 2009 and since then, I only stick with a few web hosting providers below. You should take a look at them and pick one that you think it suits your requirements.
Temok
Temok is a newer hosting company that founded in 2014. However, they have done a good job at running their business, building up the reputation and helping clients to get a great experience with a fair price. Like A2 Hosting, Temok offers a wide range of products, including shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, domain name registration, and much more.
I moved one of my websites from iPage to Temok two months ago and so far so good. There is no downtime yet, and the load speed is good enough.
A2 Hosting
Have you heard about A2 Hosting before? Not? Oops!
Formerly known as Iniquinet, their company has also been around since 2001, with many data centers around the world, including the US, Europe, and Asia. Besides, they have also claimed that their services will have up to 99.9% uptime, as well as 24/7 support. It just sounds too good, right?
I have used their web hosting services for years and now still. In fact, this blog is using A2 Hosting at this moment, and it’s quite good. I don’t have anything to complaint about their services at all.
There are four major factors that I love A2 Hosting are:
- It has an excellent uptime, as they claimed, up to 99.9%.
- It has a good loading speed, which claimed faster than other services 20 times. In fact, it doesn’t reach that rate, but still pretty good.
- It offers a pretty good price that I don’t need to spend too much money on my website.
- It can handle a lot of traffic per month. I have tested and the result is that every month my A2 Hosting account handled more than 500,000 visitors (combined from Google Analytics results of a few websites). That’s an incredible performance while you only need to spend $10 per month(*), right?
* A2 Hosting is offering 51% OFF in their first bill to new customers. For example, the TURBO plan (shared web hosting) normally costs $18.99 per month. As a new client, you only need to pay $9.31 per month. Just need to use promote code: FLEET51 when check out!
Bluehost
More than two million websites are currently hosted at Bluehost for now. It’s one of the most popular web hosting services that offers affordable plans.
I haven’t used Bluehost before, but two of my friends are now using their services. According to what they said, the uptime is great, up to 99.99%, affordable prices, however, the load time isn’t fast enough, and customer support also isn’t quick.
In fact, their web hosting is faster than many other web hosting services. So the “isn’t fast enough” point means isn’t faster than A2 Hosting or some well-optimized web hosting, my perspective.
Resize And Compress Your Image File To Make It Lighter
Did you know that the big part of websites is images? And that’s the reason why your site needs more time to load. If you upload and insert many images on a web page, definitely it takes much longer to load that web page completely, than a text-based HTML file.
To improve your website load time, you can resize images that you want to use on your site to the right size. For example, if the needed size of a particular image is 300px wide and 250px height, then you don’t need to use a large image, which heavier. Also, you can compress your images to make it lighter. For further information about how to compress images without losing the quality, read this article.
Enable GZIP Compression On Your Website
Alongside compressing images and make it lighter, compressing HTML, CSS, and JS files also help to reduce the size of your web page and make it loads faster. Most of servers have enabled this feature by default, and you can control it through the .htaccess file, assume that you are using an Apache web server. To learn how to enable GZIP compression on your website, read this article.
Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Technically, a CDN service takes all your static files you have got on your website, such as images, CSS or Javascript – and lets users download these files as fast as possible by serving them on servers as close to users as possible. I don’t go any further to explain what is CDN. If you are looking for that kind of information, read it from Wikipedia.org.
Currently, I’m using Amazon CloudFront as the CDN service for this blog and a few others. It helped me to improve my website’s load time a lot. You can also try KeyCDN, which is a good and affordable CDN service.
Here are basic tips to optimize your website and improve load speed. If you are using WordPress platform, there are many more things you can do to improve the load time, such as using a cached plugin, add LazyLoad to your images, minify CSS and JS files, and optimize & clean up the database.
Have you used any other methods to optimize your website and improve the loading speed of your site?