Web Development is a vital step for any online business and plays a significant role in its success or failure. Don’t you agree with me? I know most of the readers here would not agree with my statement, but it’s true up to some extent.
During my meetings and consultancy with online business owners, I found that most of them were not happy with the web development work their vendors did for them. It’s not about the website design or website cost that their web development company charged them; it’s about the website performance and their web consultant’s inability to resolve their issues.
One of the issues that most online business owners face is the slow speed of their websites. This issue affects not only business owners but also search engines because significant search engines like Google consider website speed to be one of the major factors in showing websites in search engine results.
So, in this blog post, I will share a few tips that can enhance the loading and surfing time of your website and, therefore, decrease the bounce rate as well.
Image Optimization
It’s very easy for SEOs to say that images slow down website download speeds and that we should avoid using them, but is it feasible/advisable that a website not have nice graphics to attract visitors and encourage them to read more and stay longer on the website?
Using images on the website is not a bad idea as long as they are optimized at their best level. If you also find speed issues on your website, get your web designer to look over the sizes of images first and try to get them optimized through software/tools like Adobe Photoshop, etc. I have also noticed cases when the photos look small, but their sizes aren’t tiny because some web designers would resize the immense images in HTML and reduce their sizes, but that doesn’t work. So, check on them as well.
Once you have optimized images on your website, you will notice that the download speed is enhanced, and visitors love to surf your website.
Reducing JavaScripts
Using too much JavaScript also affects the speed of a website, so your web designer needs to pay attention to JavaScript, which is not necessary for your website, and it’s good to remove it altogether. In other words, using JavaScript on websites should be reduced as much as possible.
By the way, let me add that using minimum JavaScript could also increase the chances of enhancing your SERP ranking, as search engines also don’t like JavaScript. Oh yes, SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.
Minimizing other scripts
Other than Javascript, a few other scripts, like CSS, can also increase website download times, so it would be good if your web designer could take care of CSS optimization as well.
Using proper redirection
If your website has a few or several 404 or 403 errors, your web designer or developer may fix them by properly redirecting the affected pages. For example, if any of your webpages have been removed permanently, there should be a 301 redirection, and if some webpages are removed temporarily, a 302 redirect may be used.
Again, this will help optimize your website’s speed and increase its chance of being listed in search engine results. I hear you ask how we can check such 404 and 403 errors. Don’t worry; GWT (Google Webmasters Tool) has everything. You need to configure your website for it, and GWT will show you all the data.
Compression
You may also ask your web designer to go for compression to reduce the HTTP response size using Gzip. It reduces the file size on the server itself, and your browser may accept it in zip format and unzip it for your users. This process is so fast that the users can see the fully rendered page in a couple of seconds or a fraction of a second. To check whether your web designer has done it correctly or not, you may use the tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Check the codes properly
After your website development is completed, you need to check whether the codes used by your web developers are error-free. I know it’s easy for you to check these codes, but here is a tool to check your website codes quickly: https://validator.w3.org. So now, your website developers can’t hide anything from you and are bound to deliver error-free work.
You may start using the above tips to check and implement for your website; in the meantime, I will think about some more valuable tips to enhance your website speed and come back shortly.