How To Speed Up Your Website

The major search engines stress the importance of having a fast website. Google, for instance, claims that it uses site speed as a factor when evaluating and ranking websites. Websites that are faster often get better placement in the SERPs than those with sluggish speed. People who browse the internet do not also like slow loading websites. They tend to leave sites that do not load within the first few seconds. To ensure your site speed does not negatively affect your placement in the search results page and to improve your site visitors’€™ browsing experience, see to it that you work on improving the loading time of your website. Below are ways on how you can speed up your site:

Remove Unnecessary Widgets From Your Sidebar

If your website takes too much time to load, you should inspect your website for elements that are likely causing the problem. These elements are often seen in your sidebar. You may have a lot of widgets that show badges, feeds from your other websites and social media buttons. Using too many widgets can slow down your website so evaluate which of the widgets you use do not really add value to your site. You can remove the unnecessary widgets or you use alternatives to speed up your site. If you are showing images of your followers on Facebook to get people to follow you, for instance, you may instead use social media buttons which loads a lot faster. You may also use HTML links when linking to other sites instead of using badges.

Use A Fast Loading Template

Look for a fast loading template if you want your site to load fairly quickly. Templates that contain too many images tend to be slower so look for a template that does not use images as its background design. If you want to use a header image, have the image resized first or have it hosted by an image hosting site so it won’€™t have a negative impact on your website’s loading speed.

Avoid Using Too Many Images & Videos On Your Website

Images and videos can add color and aesthetic appeal to your website but using too many of these on your website can slow it down so minimize the amount of images and videos that you post on your site. Should you need to post images, consider using resized version of the files. You can also have your images hosted in sites such as Photobucket and Flickr to avoid overloading your web server.

Choose A Reliable Web Hosting Company

No matter how hard you try to do something about your site speed, your efforts will be in vain if your site is hosted by a hosting service provider that frequently experiences outages and is known to overload their web servers. Your site is likely slow and sometimes inaccessible if your website is hosted by an unreliable web hosting company. Your choice for a web host is crucial in ensuring your site’€™s uptime and loading speed. When shopping around for a web host, read reviews posted by other webmasters online so you can avoid companies that provide unreliable hosting services. You may also need to evaluate your hosting needs. Shared hosting may not be for you if your site already receives thousands of visitors per day. You may experience a lag in your site speed if you are still on a shared hosting environment and you already accommodate thousands of visitors daily. To avoid speed and uptime issues, look for a web host that can accommodate the traffic that you have if your website experiences exponential growth.