Loading Time: 3 Ways To Speed Up A Website

These days speed is everything. Stop and think for a moment how speed permeates so many aspects of  our daily life; we have fast food, speed dating, get rich quick schemes, accelerated learning and crash diets to name just a few.

In fact, in our quest to move from A to B in the shortest possible time, we are conditioned to think that faster is better.

In the digital age, no one likes slow loading web pages or waiting around for information. Your potential website visitors are no different. If your pages load slowly, people will click away, no matter how epic your content.

In fact, recent studies show that the average waiting is just 10 seconds or less.

Even Google’s recent algorithm changes have made site speed critical to the success of your online business. It’s now essential that your web pages load up quickly or you will get penalized.

I admit, loading speed is not the sexiest topic for any blogger or business owner to think about. After all you’d rather be spending your time on more creative or productive pursuits that get you more subscribers, attract more customers and make you more money.

The truth is, faster websites encourage visitors to hang around so it’s worth checking your site’s loading speed.

How Fast Is My Website?

If you want to test the current page load speed of your website then use this free resource Pingdom.

Just add your URL in the search box and Pingdom will check your site and give you a performance rating. Anything above 80% is acceptable.

Pingdom will also show you what aspects of your website are fast, slow, too big and so on and make suggestions that even a beginner can implement. You can also sign up for its alert service and get notifications whenever you website load time goes up or down.

Here are #3 things you can do to right now to speed up your site and keep your visitors’ attention

1. Check Your Hosting Account

If you have shared hosting then you should be aware that you are not the only business using that company’s servers. Like many Internet service providers, some hosts will slow your site speed down if they feel you are exceeding their limits as part of their fair usage policy.

But having a dedicated Virtual Private Server (VPS) can be expensive especially when you are starting out.

One way around this is to choose a reputable hosting company like Dreamhost that provides unlimited bandwidth and unlimited accounts.

Dreamhost has powerful Linux servers which ensure that every website hosted on them experiences the same fast load times. Just make sure you create a separate user account for every new domain to avoid being restricted.

2. Get A Premium Theme

Themes affect the look, layout and functionality of your site and they are not the place to try and save a few cents.

Nowhere does the basic rule “you get what you pay for” apply more than to themes.

Don’t be seduced by all those free themes on the Internet.

Not only will every Tom, Dick or Harry be using them but they often have very basic code that is outdated and painfully slow when it comes to your website load time.

Instead go for one of the powerful frameworks like Thesis or Genesis, which are designed by and for professional bloggers. I use both themes on my own blogs as well as for client websites and can’t recommend them highly enough.

They have inbuilt SEO, a huge range of child themes, many of them responsive, and clean, modern code that helps speed up websites and get them purring like a Ferrari.

 3. Remove Unused Plugins

WordPress Plugins are little bits of software that help improve the functionality of your website. They cover virtually everything from SEO to analytics and there are literally hundreds of free plugins around, all designed to make your life easier. Many of them appear in the WordPress directory.

Although it’s very tempting to go mad and start uploading every single plugin you come across, a word of warning – don’t!

Plugins take up a lot of disk space and can slow down your site if you’re not careful. You only need one SEO plugin, not four! Make a point of deleting any plugins you don’t use and update them regularly to make sure you have the latest version.

So there you have 3 quick ways to speed up a website.

Have you checked your website speed recently? What did you find? How have you improved slow loading web pages?

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