10 Ways to Speed Up Your Web Page Load Time
If a motivated seller visits your website but can’t load your web page within a few seconds, they’re not going to think twice about moving on to a competitor site. Slow load times are one of the leading causes of high bounce rates on websites. In a market-driven by a growing number of mobile users, fast load times are crucial to your site’s success.
The ideal website load time is instant. However, an acceptable load time is two seconds. Each second beyond two seconds results in higher bounce rates. Nearly 40% of Internet users abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Nearly 50% of users expect any desktop site to load in 2 seconds or less. Anything longer than that keeps your website from competing.
1. Avoid URL Redirects
URL redirection, also known as URL forwarding, is a technique to give more than one URL address to a page, a form, or a whole Web site/application. For this operation, HTTP has a special kind of response called an HTTP redirect. A 301 redirect is the method used to retain the SEO value of the forwarding page.
Redirects slow down the speed of your page, as it takes time to go from one file to another. Therefore, try to avoid or minimize the number of URL redirects whenever possible.
2. Clear Out Your Database
Your central database where your website accesses files or software can become overloaded with unused information like photos, files, and other media over time.
Try to identify and eliminate needless data and unused content from your database. It helps your web hosting server to fetch requested information more efficiently.
3. Clean Up Your Media Library
Your media library may be cluttered with old images or unused images. Unused media clogs up your website. Clean up your media library by deleting unnecessary images and other media files for faster average page load times.
4. Optimize Images
Slow down your web page speed, making it harder for the site visitor to view your website. Optimize your images, but don’t destroy image quality. Small image files are good but avoid an amateurish-looking website. Optimize your images for Google, so they look good on any platform.
5. Streamline HTML
Streamline your HTML code to accelerate site speed. Bloated HTML increases the volume of data that is transferred to users. It can also impact JavaScript performance when you’re manipulating the DOM.
If you find that your HTML pages contain 5,000 or 6,000 lines of code before any content on the page, you’re looking at bloated HTML. You need to streamline the code and clean it up. You should notice a significant improvement in your page’s loading speed afterward.
6. Minify CSS and JavaScript
Another effective page load, time reduction tactic, is to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Minification is a process that strips out all unnecessary characters, comments, and spaces in the code, and uses shorter variable and function names, thereby streamlining the code.
Minification reduces the file size considerably and thus makes the website load much faster. In a way, Minification will make your client-side javascript code unreadable and thus more unhackable. Minification is standard practice for all js and CSS code but not common for HTML and PHP files.
7. Reduce HTTP Requests
A highly effective method for reducing page load time is reducing the number of HTTP requests a page makes. When someone visits a web page, the browser pings the web server, requesting the files that make up the content for the page.
When the server responds with the requested files, the browser renders the content on the page. The browser makes a separate HTTP request for every file comprising the page’s content. The more files on the page, the more HTTP requests, and consequently, the longer your web page takes to load.
8. Use Gzip for file compression
GZip is a server-side data compression that helps reduce page loading time. In other words, it takes a set of data and makes it smaller for more streamlined, efficient delivery to a user’s computer. Gzip compression reduces the size of your HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files. It does not work on images or videos, as these are already compressed separately.
9. Configure a fast infrastructure or use a fast host
Page speed optimization starts with having the right infrastructure. Be sure that your web stack is built for speed. Host your site on a dedicated, high-performance server.
Even when your website has a clean design and optimized code, shared servers can slow you down. Make sure you’re on the latest versions of the technology in use. And ensure caching is optimized.
10. Use a CDN
Shorten the distance information has to travel between your server and the end-user. Makes sense, right? An easy way to do that is to use a CDN.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers (also known as POPs). They work in tandem to deliver your web content more quickly. Whether your site uses HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, or videos, a CDN is an excellent way to increase website speed.
Contact Magnyfi for Automated Lead Follow-Up Solutions
Magnyfi can help you get more qualified leads through Spark, our fully customizable lead generation tool. Learn more about how we can help you implement the Motivated Seller Prospects Marketing Program in your area.
To check the availability of your market, fill out our application form or contact us at (877) 404-1161, and we will walk you through the process. We work with a limited number of real estate investors per market, so claim my market today.
