If your website is slow to load, you’ve got big problems. Research has found that website conversion rates drop by more than 2% for each additional second of load time. What’s more 70% of consumers make purchasing decisions based on how quickly (or slowly) a web page loads up.

So in short, slow loading speeds are bad for business, terrible for SEO and not great for your reputation either. Ideally, you’ll want to work with a website development company to get your page loading speeds down to about 0-2 seconds – as this is where the highest ecommerce conversion rates occur.

But how exactly do you improve website loading speeds? Here’s some tips from our website design experts:

Test website speed regularly
You need to keep on top of website loading speeds, as they can change depending on traffic, server issues or changes you make to your site. This is why regular testing is key. It also helps you assess whether improvements you’re making are working – i.e., your site speeds up after you make a change.

There are lots of free tools out there for site speed testing, and you can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights for in-depth analysis.

Optimise your images
Hefty image files are often the culprit when loading speeds are slow. You can fix this one quite easily by optimising your images and other files. This involves reducing resolutions and dimensions, and compressing the files. The good news is that there are lots of tools and plugins out there that will do this for you (often for free).

Avoid redirects
This is a quick tip, but it could save a whole heap of time. If your site has any redirects – where visitors to one page are forwarded to another – this can slow loading times. It could be just a fraction of a second, or it could even be whole seconds. So, it’s best to avoid redirects if loading speeds are a concern.

Optimise your code
Due to the technical work involved, this is probably a job for your web design agency unless you have coding skills. Optimising or ‘minifying’ code such as HTML and JavaScript involves removing anything unnecessary so that your site runs faster. For example, spaces, unnecessary characters, unused code, formatting and code comments. Removing bulky or unnecessary code should speed up your site.

Just be careful what you remove, unless you’re an experienced coder. If unsure, use professional web design services just to be safe.

Enable caching
Caching helps users to load pages much faster, as necessary files to load your website are already temporarily stored on their browser. This means they don’t have to reload the whole page from scratch. You can leverage caching to speed up your site’s loading speeds, using a plugin like WP Super Cache (for WordPress sites).

Need expert help to make your website a little zippier? Work with our web design UK specialists here at Nextgen Marketing – get in touch to find out more.