Your website speed matter more than you think. In fact, 53% of website visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And the majority of them won’t come back, about 79% admit they won’t return to a website if they have a poor experience. And 75% of people say they base the credibility of a company on how it’s website looks and performs. So as you can see your website’s load time as a direct impact on your bottom line. That’s why in this article I’m going to go over 5 tips to speed up your website.

1. Compress your images. Many websites suffer from having images that are too large in file size, thus resulting in web pages that take forever to load. To address this issue, compress your image’s file size so that they load faster. There’s a ton of software out there that will help you compress images, such as PhotoShop. And there are a number of free websites that will help as well. Just search Google for free online image compression and you’ll get a list of websites. Once you’ve compressed your images and replaced them on your website, you’ll have a much faster loading site. In some cases, I’ve seen this increase a web page’s load time by 200% or more.
2. Content delivery network. A content delivery network is a network of servers (computers) across the globe that will house your website’s files, images, and other content so that your web server doesn’t have to take all traffic load. On top of the content delivery networks have servers in lots of locations; thus the chances are their servers are closer physically closer to your website visitor’s location. Which both being closer physically and reducing the server load will help speed up your website. So you should consider adding a content delivery network to your website set up. One company I suggest, which I’ll go into detail later is Cloudflare.
3. Reduce plugins. If your running WordPress, Durpal, Magento or any other framework to run your website then you’ll want to reduce and remove any unused or slow loading plugins. To test if a plugin is causing your website to load slow, you can disable each plugin one by one and check your website. Most of the frameworks out there allow you to do this from an admin login area. But if you need help, feel free to use the free evaluation link below and our Tampa web design company will answer your questions and review your plugins.
4. Get better hosting. Having bad hosting can make a serious impact on your website’s load time. To find out if your hosting is causing an issue search Google for comparison charts on your current hosting provider. That will give you an idea of how well they perform verse other companies. There are also a number of free websites out there that will do a test of your website and hosting to help you determine if your hosting is slowing down your site. Just search Google for website hosting speed test. Another note here, if you’re on a shared hosting plan your website is most likely going to load much slower than being on a dedicated server or cloud hosting. If you’re not sure what all those are, check out my video on how to pick the right web hosting.
5. Use Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a free system that sits between your website and your web visitors. It can help speed up your website using a number of methods. One of them is that they offer a content delivery network, which we talked about in point #2, and they offer software that will optimize your code and images. If you’re not using Cloudflare you’ll want to check them out as they’re relatively simple to set up and can in many cases speed up your website.
6. Reduce code bloat & requests. Sometimes when a website is built there is extra code left behind or extra spacing between the code. This issue, plus having code in multiple files that can be reduced into one file, thus reducing request to download files, can result in a faster website. To address this you may need a web developer, but he or she can make an assessment of the code and then make corrections as needed. This can result in a large reduction in load time if your site has a lot of problems in this area. If you need help with that, feel free to get our free evaluation.

If you need help with any of these above points, take advantage of our free evaluation by using the link below.

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