2 easy ways to improve your website speed

Is your website fast enough to engage customers? Are you willing to bet the success of your business on it?

That’s not an exaggeration, nearly half of online shoppers will simply give up on a website that takes over 3 seconds to load. Even a delay of just 1 second in page response time can have a noticeably negative impact on your conversion rates.

Standing out online is already tough. Your competition is easy to find, and your would-be customers don’t have much patience for poor user experience. Here are two actionable steps that can improve your website’s speed and grow your business:

Optimise your images

In the modern web environment, images are key for creating a positive user experience. But implementing them isn’t as simple as it sounds and potentially devastating mistakes are quite common.

In terms of file size, images are often the largest part of a website. This means that they can have a powerful impact on page load times. Far too many sites will force their users to load huge image files, relying on HTML or CSS values to shrink their apparent display value after the fact.

You can cut down on data transmission by cropping images to their correct display size or at least to the largest intended display size if you’re relying on responsive design to adjust your visuals. You’ll also want to ensure that the image format is web-friendly and won’t cause display issues on certain devices. JPEGs and PNGs are usually safe choices.

Out down on redirects

Responsive design, where the layout and elements of your website adjust depending on the user’s available screen size, seems to be everywhere these days. But up until fairly recently, the most popular solution for serving both desktop and mobile devices was to create a mobile-specific version of the entire website.

Even if your website already takes advantage of responsive design, it’s worth exploring whether your users are being served in the most efficient way. Any website that’s frequently updated can collect additional redirects over time. Conducting an SEO audit can help you to identify speed bottlenecks and ultimately create a better, more encouraging experience for your customer base.