9 practical ways to reduce Website loading time
We all know that SEO is one of the major way to achieve traffic from search engines. With SEO there is a term associated named as page load, this is the time taken by a page to load completely. You can call this page load time as website loading time, now you must know that major search engines like Google takes this website loading time very seriously.
Website loading time can make a huge difference when search engines ranks the content. When there is an increase in website loading time search engines lowers the rank of the content, and with the decrease in website loading time the rank rises. Having a faster loading website have a positive side for search engines as well as delivers a great user experience. Even users tends to leave slow loading website more than a fast one, with bad user experience a rise in bounce rate is observed.
There are few ways by which you can reduce website loading time to make it fast and SEO friendly.
9 important tips to reduce loading time of your website
These tips are going to reduce website loading time to a great extent, If you are using WordPress as a CMS then you can implement these steps easily.
1 – Remove Flash
Flash makes your content interesting right, but this is very bad for SEO. Flash uses a lot of data, means these are heavy files which takes a lot of time to load. So where ever it is possible you should avoid using flash. You should also check your plugins as some plugins uses flash, if you have one then try removing it or find other which don’t use flash. You can take help of our Best list of plugins to find the one that best suits you.
2 – Reduce plugins
Plugins holds weight, in fact some of the plugins are really very heavy, while blogging you should know that which plugins are the ones which you really need. you should use the plugins which uses very fewer resources. Having more plugins will have more load on page, so in order to reduce website loading time you should think of reducing the numbers of plugins you have on your website.
In WordPress CMS you have the option to use plugin profile plugin which can detect the loading time of all the plugins by which you can find the plugins which are increasing the page load. After that you can remove the plugin or find an alternate which uses fewer resources.
You should avoid using two plugins for one kind of task, remove the plugins which you are not using. This will reduce website loading time to a great extent.
3 – Hosting Speed
You should always prefer a reliable and fast hosting. A good hosting can make reduce website loading time to a great extent. There are many people out there who purchase web hosting from some local company who don’t have a reliable name in the business. Always buy web hosting form a well-known source, there are many companies who have a big name in the industry to give a reliable web hosting service.
Before settling for a hosting company you should check the response time of their servers, must read the reviews about the hosting companies. Most of popular companies have good response time, you should even check the up time of the hosting. Hosting which have a considerable amount of down time is really bad for SEO, you should absolutely avoid it. Always prefer a good hosting company to reduce website loading time.
4. Optimize Images
Images are very much responsible in increasing the page load time, we all use images to make our content more presentable. Images helps viewers to remain engaged with the content, enhances user experience. Images are heavy so you should consider optimizing them so that you can reduce website loading time to a great extent.
You can get all the ways to optimize images in the link above, you should always try to have compressed and resized image which is need according to the size of the browser window. Serving optimized images will help you to reduce website loading time while increasing user experience.
5. Too many advertisements
Well Advertisements are very much important for the generation of revenue from the website. Every one likes to earn more and more for their work, so in order to earn more you should not get into displaying too many adds. Then most popular online Ad company Google Adsense have rule for maximum number of ads hat can be displayed on a page.
The reason behind it is that ads takes a sufficient amount of load to display, if the number the ads increase the load of the ads also gets increased so more the ads more the load so you should choose the number of Ads you like to display on your website wisely.
You can even consider choosing text Ads, text uses very less data compared to images or animation. Try to choose Google Adsense over others as the Ads are optimized and gives better CPC than others.
6. Use CDN.
Use a CDN which is short for content delivery network. A CDN is very useful to reduce website loading time, most of the major website uses CDN to deliver the content. What this CDN does is it delivers the content from the nearest CDN server. How this works is that hosting companies have placed serves on a specific geo locations like U.S, is a person from other end of the world try to access the website on the server then it will take more time than the person in U.S. This is due to the distance, here comes the use of CDN, a CDN delivers the content of the website from the nearest server reducing the time.
With less loading time and faster performance website gets a great boost in SEO. CDN will help your site load faster in every part of the world.
7. Quality theme.
You must be very careful while choosing a theme for your website, it’s very important how your website looks and behaves. You should be very careful while choosing a theme or template for your website, a nice design can significantly increase the viewership experience. What people neglect is the fact that a theme should be clean coded, with clean coded the performance of the website increases.
How this happens is when someone opens a website the code is accessed to display the page, if the code is heavy then it will take more time to load where as a light coded themes takes less time. This will reduce website loading time to a great extent.
8. Use Caching
You should consider using a caching plugin which can help you reduce the page load drastically. In caching when some one loads your website then few things are saved as cache files which are stored on the computer of the user. When the user visits another or same page then the items that are stored as cache on users computer is directly taken form there.
This way the page does not have request server to send the same file again reducing the server load and making the page load blazing fast.
9. Minifying JS and CSS
You should consider to minify the js and css code that is running on your website. the number of lines used to code increases the load of the website. If you try to reduce the lines by compressing the JavaScript and CSS sheets, this way it will take less lines to read all the code so website loads fast.
These lines have a great effect when bots read the source code, this will help you website gain some ranking as it have en effect on SEO.
Conclusion
By reducing website loading time you can gain an upper hand on SEO, you can gain more traffic which is good your website. You should keep a close check on your website loading time so that you have a fast website.
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