Minimize The Page Loading Time of Your Site with These 5 Golden Tips

Do you know that your page load time will decide whether your visitor will explore your website further or part their ways? Research has found that over 83 percent users expect a web page to load in not more than 2 seconds. Not only this, it has also been found that nearly 40 percent website visitors abandon a website’s page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Here are some highly effective tips that can help you reduce your page load time:

Try to minimize HTTP Requests

Did you know that around 80 percent of a page’s load time is spent downloading the different elements of the page including stylesheets, images, scripts, Flash, etc?  HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, hence the more on-page components, the more time it takes for the page to render.

Hence, always remember that the best way to improve page speed is to simplify your design. Leaner is always better.

• Use CSS instead of images if possible.
• Try to combine multiple stylesheets into one.
• Reduce scripts & put them at the bottom of your page.
• Streamline the number of elements on your webpage.

Optimize your images

Images that are oversize take more time to load. Hence it is important scale the images before uploading them to the website. Another way to optimize images is to compress them. You will get many free online tools for compression that can help you reduce the size of your images without losing quality.

Compression can improve your page load speed dramatically

Large pages are generally 100kb or more in size. Hence, they are bulky as well as slow to download. However, by compressing them, you can easily improve the load speed of your web pages.

Compression can reduce the bandwidth of your webpages, thereby reducing HTTP response & improving its speed.

Don’t forget to utilize the browser caching

Don’t make your website visitors download the same things whenever they load a page.

By enabling browser caching, you can store some data on your visitors’ computer temporarily, so that they don’t have to wait for it to load every time.

Don’t forget to optimize Your CSS

Your CSS loads before your visitors visit your website. The more time it takes for them to download your CSS, the more time they wait.

If you optimize your CSS, your files will download faster, giving your visitors quick and better access to your pages.

If you don’t use all of your CSS, get rid of the superfluous code in your files.  Also, you should minimize your CSS files. This will remove extra spaces from your code and make sure that your file is at its smallest size.

Let’s look at some interesting statistics that show web page speed really matters

• Even 1 second delay in web page load time leads to 11 percent fewer page views, 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction & 7 percent loss in conversions.
• Around 79 percent shoppers who experience trouble with site performance say that they don’t want to return to the website to purchase again.
• Nearly 44 percent of visitors develop a negative image of the company if the load time is not satisfactory or if the site crashes.
• If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 each day, a 1 second page delay could cost $2.5 million lost in sales every year.
• Conversion rate increases 74 percent if web page load time improves from 8 to 2 seconds.

In today’s stiff competition, it is highly important for you to improve your page loading time. After all, you will only get a few seconds to impress your visitors. With the above listed tips, you can easily minimize the page loading time of your site and make a perfect first impression with your visitors.