Loading a website takes time. So, when someone lands on a page, they will likely have a negative reaction. Some might leave the page right away because it takes too long to load. You probably don’t want that to happen for your site, and how do you avoid it? This article will teach you exactly how to make sure your website loads faster and regain your visitors’ attention.

Reduce Your Image Sizes

The first thing you need to do is reduce the size of your images. The easiest way to do this is by using Photoshop or another image editing software program and reducing the image resolution (the number of pixels). Keep in mind that this will make the image smaller but not affect its quality too much. For example, if you have an image that’s 1024×768, try reducing it to 640×480 or even 320×240. This will help speed up your website significantly because images take up a lot of bandwidth (data).

There are also many online tools that can help you reduce your image size. Some of these include TinyPNG, WP Smush, and ShortPixel. The good thing about these tools is that they automatically compress images while keeping their quality as high as possible.

Optimize Your Website Code

Your website code is the foundation that your site is built upon. There are a number of tools available to help you check the quality and speed of your code, including Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix.

In general, you want to make sure you’re using efficient code that loads quickly in all browsers, including mobile devices. This can be accomplished by keeping page sizes under 10 MB, using CSS sprites or lazy loading images and compressing images with tools like TinyPNG and JPGMini.

Remove or Replace Heavy Plugins

Plugins such as Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7 are often used for contact forms, but they can slow down your site. It’s best to use an alternative that won’t affect page speed as much, such as Contact Form 7 Lite.

If you want to use Gravity Forms, you can reduce the number of features it uses. You can also find other plugins that can replace it.

Limit Redirects

Redirects are used to direct a user from one page to another. This can be done for a variety of reasons, such as when moving from one domain to another or updating URLs. Redirects also have the potential to slow down your site because they have to be processed by the browser before being able to access the new URL.

The best way to avoid this problem is by using absolute redirects instead of relative ones. Absolute redirects tell the browser where it needs to go when the link is clicked, whereas relative redirects tell it how far back it needs to go.

Compress Images With A CDN

There are a lot of reasons why you should use a CDN, but one of the most important is that it can help compress images before they are sent to your users. This doesn’t mean that you should use a CDN for every image on your website. It does mean that you should consider using one for images that have larger file sizes or when you want to reduce the load time of your site overall.

A good way to do this is by using Cloudinary, an image management solution that offers a free plan, which includes 60 MBs per image and 1 GBs per month of storage. You can also integrate Cloudinary with your existing tools and applications by providing API access or adding it as a module in Ruby on Rails, Node.js, and Django applications.

Ensure Your Website Hosting is Fast and Reliable.

No matter how well you optimize your site, if it’s hosted on a slow server or an unreliable one, it won’t be able to load in under two seconds no matter what you do! That’s why it’s so important that you choose a hosting provider that will guarantee fast page loading speeds and high uptime so that your visitors can get what they came for — whatever that may be — as quickly as possible.

It’s also important to choose a provider that offers a wide variety of server locations so that your visitors will get content from the closest possible location. This ensures they don’t have to wait longer than they need to for pages to load.

Use a Fast Theme.

Themes can make or break your website’s speed. A slow theme can be one of the biggest contributors to slow load times. The best themes are lightweight and optimized for performance. If you’re using a custom theme, make sure it’s lightweight and optimized for speed.

Takeaway

In the end, if you are going to optimize your site for speed, it’s important to stay up-to-date on both the latest trends and best practices for speeding up a website. This way, you can always be sure that you’re using the latest techniques and tools, and not trying to cut corners by using old advice.