Today things are moving much faster than they used to, people expect things done quicker than ever and with so much competition out there they are quite willing to take their money elsewhere if they are not satisfied.
A study done by Akamai says that people expect web pages to load within 2 seconds and that 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds.
With this in mind, we thought we would spend a little time giving a few pointers on how to increase the performance of your website to help keep your customers happy.
Optimise Images
Large images take longer to load so make sure you are resizing your images before you upload them using imade editting software.
You can also compress your images with a online too like tinyPNG.
Reduce the number of plugins
Too many plugins really slow your site down, make sure you're deleting plugins if you're not using them any more.
You can also try disabling all your plugins and then re-enabling them one at a time to see which ones are effecting your sites performance the most.
Using a caching plugin
One of the quickest and easiest way to cut your page loading time is by installing a caching plugin.
They are free to download if you are using a CMS like Drupal.
Clean up your database
Using a CMS your database can quickly get very messy with saved drafts, post revisions and deactivated plug-ins.
The easiest way to clean these up is to add the DB maintenance module to Drupal or WP Optimise for Wordpress.
Fix all your broken links
Broken links are not only an absolute pain for readers but a real drain on bandwidth.
You can use a free link checker like W3C Link Checker.
Hire a good company to build your website and create your content
All the above points will easily be covered if you have a knowledgable company to build your website and do your marketing for you.
Good-quality hosting
The quality of your hosting company does make a difference, check out this web hosting speed test that was done and the interesting results.
If you are worried about the loading time of your website you can check it using PageSpeed Insights which is an amazing tool that will give you a score out of 100 for page speed and break down everything you can do to improve the load time of your website.
The bottom line is a faster website is going to put you ahead of the competition and equate to more sales.
The flipside to that, with mobile usage recently taking over desktop usage, is that if your site is taking too long to load it's just not going to get seen.
