It’s no secret that slow sites lead to high abandonment but did you know improvements can not only increase on site time but also help conversions? Your favorite Scottsdale Web Design company, NEXTFLY, brings you some highly effective tips to speed up your site and increase conversions by up to 7%!!
Size Images Before Uploading
Images can often contain extra comments and use useless colors. Keeping image size to a minimum is a big help for loading pages faster and convenient for users on slow connections. Always save your images in JPEG format. You can edit your images to the correct size before and then if you feel the need to, use compression tools.
If you’re using WordPress, you can install the WP Smush.it plugin. IT automatically compresses your images and reduce the size without losing any visual quality. This plugin works in the background every time you upload a new image. You can also run it retrospectively on all of the images uploaded to your media library.
Minimize RTTs
Round trip time or RTT is defined as the time taken for the client to send a request and the server to respond. Though RTT is affected by a huge range of things, the number of requests that are being sent impact it the most.
Reducing the number of HTTP requests made will massively reduce the round-trip time. You can take a number of actions for minimizing the round trip time. You can try using CSS sprites to call less images, minify and combine your JS and CSS files, and don’t call anything that you don’t need.
Optimize CSS Delivery
When CSS is poorly delivered, the browser has to wait to download and process the styling data before it can fully finish displaying your web page to your visitors. Pages access this information either as an external file, which loads before your page renders, or inline, which is inserted in the HTML document itself.
First you should run CSS optimization test to see what actions you need to take ahead. Then, combine all the CSS scripts that you can into one bigger CSS script. Next, compress this script to reduce the amount of data your visitors have to download when loading your web pages. Also, avoid including CSS in HTML code, such as divs or your headings.
Consistent URL
Having a consistent URL will help you save resources that are shared across multiple pages. It reduces the overall payload size, save you additional round-trip times and ensure that the same resource is not served from a different hostname, to avoid the performance penalty of additional DNS lookups.
This way, the JS files are likely to already be in the browser cache when a user goes to your website, saving them some seconds. You should also carefully consider the URL structure you use. Avoid using extraneous characters, using dashes, and add appropriate keywords.
Page speed is now more important than ever and you should take every possible step to make your site as possible because you’re losing dollars with every millisecond delay.