Website speed matters more than you might think. If you’ve ever been on a slow website then you’ll know how frustrating it can be waiting for pages to load. Sometimes, photographs and descriptions might not load correctly which makes it virtually impossible to actually buy a product.
In some cases, services might be down or unusable which makes it hard to even give the business your hard-earned money.
Thankfully, it’s easy to improve your website speed by just following a few simple steps. Even if you’re not a web developer, here are some tips that can help you speed up loading times and improve website performance.
Optimize large images and videos before uploading them to your website
If you’re posting your own photographs for product pictures or hosting videos on your website that automatically play, then it’s actually going to slow down the experience and make it frustrating for your customers. This is because these large photos and videos take time to load. They’re not exactly small and they’ll eat away at the customer’s data caps.
As such, you’ll want to optimize images and videos for the web so that they load as quickly as possible. This may involve downsizing photographs that you’ve taken then converting them to PNG files. For videos, it might mean lowering the resolution so that it loads faster at the cost of some image quality.
However, what if you’ve done this already and it’s still loading slowly? If you’ve narrowed the issue down to your images and other content loading slowly, then you could benefit from using a content distribution network (CDN for short).
This is essentially a network of servers that distributes the load of serving content to your visitors. This involves storing multiple copies of your site and content at different locations around the world to ensure that everyone has fast access to your website.
Is your web host the main problem?
Websites are hosted on servers which are essentially computers that are dedicated to keeping your website up. These servers can occasionally encounter problems and the potential issues will change depending on how your website is hosted.
For example, if it’s self-hosted in your office, then you may need a thorough IT assessment to help you identify why it’s slow. It could be because your internet connection is too slow, but it might also be because the hardware isn’t sufficient for handling lots of users.
However, if you’re using a host that you pay for, your slow internet speeds could be explained by a bad web host. A web host should have fast internet speed and well-maintained hardware in order for your website to function correctly.
Sadly, some web hosts can be lazy with this, resulting in poor website performance that needs to be dealt with. This is where an IT provider can step in and help. Don’t hesitate to reach out to a trust MSP who can help you narrow down the reason for your problem and help improve your network.