5 Simple Tricks To Speed Up Your Sluggish Website

40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, so it should be a key priority to make sure your website is running as fast as possible and to really focus on keeping that bounce rate low. Sluggish websites have negative impacts on user experience, as we expect information fast, and when a website doesn’t deliver this, the brand will suffer as a result. From a business point of view, this means a decrease in traffic and page views and ultimately conversions, making your website more of a liability than a valuable asset.

However, it can be difficult to determine how fast is fast enough. But we’re hoping if you use these simple tips and tricks in this blog post, you can get your website up to speed in no time.

Removing Unnecessary Plugins

This is particularly something to think about when using WordPress sites, where plugins are some of the biggest culprits for slowing down your site. While plugins have numerous benefits when it comes to the functionality of your site, it’s important to ask yourself whether or not they are necessary. Essentially you need to ask yourself do I need it, and do I use it, if the answer to any of those is no, get rid and see your site speed improve. It’s something very simple but also something many forget about, so make sure you pay attention to the plugins on your site!

Optimize and Reduce Image Size

Again, this is a very simple tip, but something many of us simply don’t do enough. Having unnecessarily large images can really slow down your site. Before uploading images to your site, make sure to optimize and reduce the size of them. You may be concerned about how the quality of your images will be affected, but don’t worry there are various tools you can use to optimise and resize your images, such as WP Smush if you’re working on a WordPress site, or Tinypng .

Enable Caching

Cache is key to high website performance and speed, and has been found to reduce website loading time from 2.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds. Cache acts as one of the biggest players when it comes to providing content to users as quickly as possible. Essentially, caching works by storing elements that make up a web page, such as images and HTML documents on the visitor’s computer through the use of a browser cache, and on a cache server that sits on top of the website’s origin server.

When it comes to browser caching, logos and images etc are stored for a set amount of time after the visitor first visits the site. This means that the next time the user returns to the page, they will already have many of the elements that make up the page, resulting in a faster page load time. Server-side cache, however, serves multiple visitors from the same cache, this means that even the first visit to the page is sped up, significantly increasing page loading time.

Limit Social Sharing Buttons On Your Website

This might be something you wouldn’t have thought about when it comes to the loading speed of your website. We’re constantly reminded of the importance of having the ability to share posts on social media, and of course, this is important, but you should consider the impacts this can have on your site. Most social sharing buttons use JavaScript, which can slow down page speed. There is a simple solution, however, either limit the number of social sharing buttons on your site to where they are actually needed (this can also help to improve user experience). Alternatively, configure them to load asynchronously so that no negative impact is made on the page speed.

Review & Limit The Amount Of External Requests

Many websites are dependent on resources from external sources, and whilst videos and other rich content can improve rankings and engagement – they seriously slow your site down. We’re not saying don’t use content from external sources, but simply limit the amount of external requests you make, and try to host as many files as possible from your own site, you’ll see the improvements to your site speed in no time.

Here at Frogspark, we have all the tricks for speeding up your website, so why not contact us today to see what we can do for you!