Based on a recent study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, its been noted that having a one second delay in the loading time of your page leads to 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. These are numbers and percentages that you want to avoid at all costs if you run your own website. The study also highlighted the significance of increasing the loading speed of your website. Because not only will a quicker website help retain your customers on your site, but it will also help enhance and improve your Google ranking.
One of the more effective ways of enhancing your website is to restrict the number of redirects on your site. Given the fact that if you include several redirects on your site, it raises the amount of HTTP requests which in turn leads to an increase the amount of time it takes for your pages to load. Also, if you have optimized your site for in order for them to be used and accessed on mobile devices, tablets, etc. then you would have likely had to develop several redirects. This can be rectified by you changing your site over to a responsive design which will eliminate many of the redirects that you require for mobile use.
The next thing that you will want to look at is the performance of your web server. Your server is essentially the brains behind the function of your website. It is accountable for sending and receiving all of the HTTP responses to the proper destination and takes care of all of your website page elements. It is very important that your server performs at its optimal level in order to keep your website from experiencing any delays in loading your pages. Therefore, to guarantee that your server is functioning at its highest level, you should routinely examine it for any performance hiccups that may impinge on your site. If you’re unfamiliar with the operating system of a server, you may want to use a remote tool that will allow you to assess and observe the HTTP traffic flowing through the server.
One other ensuing factor that may be a problem to your website is the amount of plugins that you have installed. If you have one too many plugins they can begin to slow down the speed of your website considerably. They can also create a potential threat to the security of your website, causing it to crash, and other technical problems that can all result in serious downtime for your website. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you remove and deactivate any unimportant and unnecessary plugins that you may have installed on your website. Not only will this help speed up your load times, but will also make your site more secure for users.
