It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to significantly increase your website’s page load speed. In this article, we’ll discuss 7 quick and easy ways to increase page load speed on your site without breaking the bank.
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1. Remove Unnecessary Images
This is one of the simplest ways to make web pages load faster. For example, if you have a blog post with five or six different images included in it and your visitors never view them all or they don’t enhance the content, they are not needed for web page performance optimization.
2. Optimize Your JavaScript Files
Use a minifier to make sure there are no unnecessary characters in these scripts, which will ensure web pages load faster, especially when multiple sites are running on the same server. This is one step that many companies miss because of how easily it can be overlooked during an audit.
3. Reduce Redirects
Every time a page is redirected, it takes up extra bandwidth and can actually make your site feel slower. If you need to use redirection on certain pages because the URL structure changed for SEO purposes, put in place 301 or 307 permanent redirects instead of creating multiple temporary ones along the way to reduce page load time.
4. Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
Every time you add a query string to the end of your CSS and JavaScript files, it makes them harder for browsers to cache. This can slow down page load times significantly over time without any solution in sight because the browser will always be sending out requests instead of re-using what is already cached locally on its machine.
5. Minify CSS Files
This makes the code more compact, which allows it to load faster on browsers. It also removes characters that are not necessary, like whitespace. Use online tools for this purpose if you don’t have a minifier plugin or program already set up on your web server software.
6. Compress Images
You can do this with a tool like Kraken to significantly reduce file size. This is especially important if you have multiple high-resolution photos in one post, which tend to be larger files by nature. Make sure your hosting account provides enough resources for speed optimization and compression because this will impact the performance of every single website on that server evenly without causing problems to any one site in particular.
7. Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Scripts
If you are using Google Analytics, it is best not to install another analytics plugin because this can slow down page load time considerably. The same goes for social sharing widgets that may be added to every single post or page of your blog. These also cause a drag on performance.
The faster your site loads, the more likely you are to retain visitors and convert clicks into profit. To learn how our team of experts can help you accomplish these goals or if there is anything else we didn’t cover in the article above, contact us today! Our SEO professionals would be happy to share their knowledge with you and improve your digital marketing strategy by making sure everything from content creation all the way through online conversions runs as smoothly as possible.
Learn about the Difference Between On-Page & Off-Page SEO.
Want to try out some simple SEO? Read: How To Create Meta Tags & Descriptions for SEO.