Top tips to speed up your website

You have between 10 and 20 seconds to grab the attention of website visitors, according to research estimates. If your website is slow to load, how many of your potential customers click away before you even get off the starting block in that race?

It’s a race against time to give your leads enough incentive to delve deeper into your product or service offering.

The answer to that could be playing a major role in why you have unsatisfactory lead conversion rates.

No matter how amazing your site looks, and how dynamic and fresh your content is, slow loading times mean that your website User Experience is poor. As a result, you won’t get enough people buying from you, registering, enquiring or coming to your location.

This is particularly relevant if your target market is younger generations. To be blunt, Generations Y and Z are notoriously impatient and hard to impress! They demand quick, instant responses and easy to find information to help them with buying decisions. Increasingly, that ‘need for speed’ focuses on websites optimised for mobile phones too.

Fast website designs

The starting point for having a quick loading website is to make sure it is designed to perform brilliantly across all devices and browsers. Having a responsive website that’s nimble to use on smartphones is just plain commercial common sense.

Loading times for websites can vary according to a lot of the functionality and content used, including complex multimedia links and moving imagery of course.

Factory Pattern designs websites that work – not just in terms of brand identity and UX, but also agility in loading and navigation.

Auditing website loading speed

At this point, you could be wondering ‘How can I check how fast my website is to load?’

The fabulous people at Google have a tool for pretty much everything when it comes to checking website performance, and that includes load time testing.

This helps you to get some technical pointers to use – or to pass on to the agency hosting and maintaining your website. If you ignore this sort of insight, it could be seriously hurting your ranking on Google searches too!

Tricks to increasing website loading times

Once your website is designed correctly, there are still things to look for that effect website loading speed. Here are just a few examples:

Network – local network problems can cause temporary issues with loading speeds. Do your checks at various times to get an overall view.

Minimize HTTP requests – this is a technical way of saying make sure you don’t have a lot of different files that need to load up when someone clicks on your site. Each file involves a HTTP request going off to your server. Too many of these pinging about slows websites down.

Defer JavaScript loading – JavaScript can drag load times down. If you can, delay its necessity until critical information has appeared to have a better chance of holding on to visitor interest and patience.

Run a compression audit – this involves looking at visitor behaviour and doing an analysis of your website performance in general. Where can you optimise the agility of navigation tools, image loading and other potential ‘road blocks’?

Enable browser caching – caching efficiently is pretty basic to website ‘housekeeping’. It involves tightening up on how data is stored and organised, making sure you don’t have duplicated or redundant files dragging your page loading times down.

Use external hosting platforms – the more components and tools your website has, the slower it is to load and navigate around. Using external service providers can make your website ‘lighter’.

Getting technical on-site loading times

The above pointers are just the tip of the (slow-moving and potentially fatal) iceberg.

Ultimately, the best way to improve website loading and navigation times is to bring in the experts! Factory Pattern can find instant fixes, fast.