Do you know how long it takes your website to load? If it takes more than 4 seconds it’s too slow. Test your website speed here. Why?
Well, firstly Google penalises slow pages and ranks them lower. Also, users or potential buyers are less likely to view your website if the page takes too long to load.
Use some of the following tips to speed your website up:
- Check your hosting package – if you pay a small amount for hosting per year the chances are you are on a shared server package – there could be thousands of sites on the same server that could be affecting your performance as you share valuable resources, other options are VPS server (which we can offer here) or find a good host with no overcrowded servers. Our Shared Hosting we keep our Contention Ratio low so you don’t have to share too many resources, keeping your speeds nice and fast.
- Make sure your images are correctly sized for the area they are placed in, e.g. don’t use a 2000px x 1000px and then use style to shrink it down to 200 x 100px  – large images slow your site down so reduce image sizes by changing resolution ( 72dpi), compressing the picture and cropping out any unnecessary bits. If you don’t have photoshop try using this free tool.
- If you have a WordPress site be sparing with your plugins! – go back and check whether you actually use those plugins or whether there are better plugins. You can also run 2 other good plug-ins to minimise footprint.
- A great plugin is WP Smush – this will optimise your images to be a smaller size without the loss of quality.
WP Supercache – Will store a small cached version of your website, allowing load times to decrease as less content has to be  re-downloaded by the user. - After implementing some of these factors, it’s time to test the new changes and find what else you can change. Use this great website GT Metrix, which provides a great insight to what changes you can make to improve site performance.
Find out more or get help with your website at BlackNova Designs www.blacknovadesigns.co.uk