Making your website faster is one of the best things you can do to help grow traffic through pretty much all digital marketing channels, while also helping to keep users on your site longer and spend more money. It's well documented online that a fast website converts more users into customers and this is always good for a business.
But if you're a time-poor business owner with limited experience in website optimisation and little support in the shape of a digital marketing team, what are the easy options for you to make your website load faster? We've taken a look at the easy wins so you can concentrate on running your business.
Data is Key to a Fast Website
You want to make changes and see a faster website right? While most people will tell you to change X, Y or Z first, our number one action is to set up tracking of your existing website load performance so you know if the changes you're making are having an impact on the KPIs that matter to search engines like Google.
Our PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals tracking platform, PaceSetter, allows you to track the loading performance of your website pages over time, so as you make optimisations, you can see the impact you're having. It also helps you understand what changes you actually need to make.
Easy Website Speed Opportunities
There are loads of things that we can do to a website in order to improve the loading speed, but unless you're a full time website developer and not trying to run all the functions of a small business, you're only going to be able to do so much. To help you tackle the easy wins, we're focusing on exactly that, the simple things that you can do through your website management platform.
A Problem Shared is a Problem Halved
We love this old saying, while technology now means we can all do more with less, accepting that others are better equipped to improve some areas of website load time is critical.
By sharing your website load data from PaceSetter with your website developer, they can focus on the more complex elements on making your website faster. What's even better is that as they make improvements, you'll be able the see the impact through the tracking you've already set up.
Images, Key to a Fast Website
In all my years of working in digital marketing and SEO, image use is possibly one of the most common elements which impacts load performance. To put it simply, website contributors use images to make content more engaging and we fully support this, speaking about it in our article "Content, the format for success".
However while images make content look great, if images are not optimised before being used then they can significantly slow the load time of your website pages. We've created guides to help with all aspects of impage optimisation recently, including:
We have also got a number of tools to help you improve your image sizes too, including a free photo and image resizer and an image file type converter so that you can convert images to the best format, including the latest WEBP standard.
Remove Redirecting Links
Linking to other pages on your website is a good thing, it helps users find information more easily, what doesn't help is when those links are passed through an internal redirect.
If you're not sure what an internal redirect is, it's when a user is looking for one URL and is automatically sent to a new URL. There are lots of reasons for them, such as if an old page has been deleted, or if two pages contain similar content.
The drawback to internal redirects is that they add extra time to a page load as a user is moving through your website, so you want to take a moment to check that the final webpage address for all the links in your webpage is the same as the address in the link on your web page.
Checking this is simple, hover over the link you wan the check and look in the bottom corner of your web browser, you'll see the webpage address that the link should take you to, now click the link and check that the page which loads has the same address.
Add "Lazy Load" to Images
"Lazy load" might sound a bit techy, but trust us it's easy to do and will help to improve load times. Essentially, this stops images loading until they're needed by the visitor.
You can (and should) as your website developer to add this to all images on the site which need it, but you also need to think about this for images you're adding in content such as blogs or articles.
You can't just go and add lazy load to any image on your site though as it can be detrimental, you only need to lazy load images which aren't seen by the user when they first visit your webpage. As an example, the lovely header image doesn't need lazy loading, but your logo in the footer of your website does!
Adding this feature is super easy too, just add loading="lazy" to any images. You're going to need to look at the HTML view in your website editor to do this, but just look for img in the code to find your images.
So <img src="/myimage.webp"> would become <img src="/myimage.webp" loading="lazy"> see, it's that simple!
Don't Embed Videos
Who doesn't love a video? While video content can add a lot to a web page from an engagement perspective, you really need to ask yourself if it's actually useful and valuable on the page.
Embedding a YouTube video can add up to 0.5mb to your page load and depending on a few things, that can have serious impacts on your load time.
The options here are to avoid video all together or, to link out to that video rather than adding it into the webpage.
Avoid Video Backgrounds
Video backgrounds might look pretty but the reality is they're a distraction for users and are slowing down your website. Stop it!
Choose a Better Hosting Package
Moving website hosts is a real pain, but a low-end, cheap hosting package could be slowing your website down. This is all down to how hosting works and we're not getting into that here, but in short spending a few extra £££ a month on a better hosting package could really help your load time.
Turn Off Non-Essential Plugins
It seems that the world loves a plugin, no matter which website platform you use there are plugins available. Yes, these can be extremely useful if you're a small business owner and don't have budget for a website developer to create a custom website for you, but use them wisely.
While plugins which have been created considerately will add to your website experience, not all are created equally and some really slow your website down. As a rule of thumb, only use plugins which are essential, do you really need your text to spin around or bounce?
Delete Old Content & Assets
Part of running a fast website is managing it properly and this sometimes means a little bit of housekeeping. Like the cupboard under the stairs, our websites can accumulate old things which we just don't need any more.
Take time to review your website from time to time and remove any old files such as images which aren't being used any more. You should also review the content on your website, is that blog post from 2007 still needed, it might be and if it is, keep it, but in some industries information changes frequently and if it's out of date, redirect the URL and then delete the page.
Why is it important? The less stuff there is on your web server, the less time it will take for your server to send the data that the user needs.
Start Making Your Website Fast Now
There you go, 10 ways to make your website pages load faster, what are you waiting for? These techniques are quick and easy to make use of and while you'll need a website developer to fix some issues not mentioned here, the tips here can go a long way to improving performance.
