How to Make Your Website Fast and Why You Should

There is nothing more frustrating than a slow website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and end-user experience are both negatively impacted. As a result, your website may rank lower in search engine results. You will get fewer page views and earn less advertising revenue or convert fewer customers.

Website load times have never been more important.

Whenever Google updates its algorithm, it prioritizes high-quality content and stellar user experiences.

Offering stellar user experiences requires a website that loads quickly. According to research, the average user abandons a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Over the next few years, you're going to be in for a rude awakening if you are still making keywords the priority of your website's SEO strategy.

Let's try not to do that, shall we?

Why Your Website’s Speed Matters

No matter if it's a landing page designed to encourage visitors to click on the CTA button or an informative blog meant to win over target customers' trust, an excellent user experience is essential for the success of any site. Page speed is an important component of user experience. The following are a few important points regarding page speed.

Search engine results pages now include a new ranking factor: page experience. 

Your page ranking is ultimately determined by the factors that affect your user's experience when consuming content. When it comes to offering a good user experience, page speed is one of the most important factors.

Page speed has a direct impact on a website's user engagement, rankings, and relationship with Google.

Bounce rates may cause search engines to doubt the legitimacy of a site, thereby hampering its ranking. So, even with perfect content and perfect keywords, a page that is slower will likely lose its ranking in the long run since it has a high bounce rate.

The majority of businesses today understand SEO well. In order to be competitive in 2022 and beyond, you need to think beyond keywords and content. 

You may not find much difference in the value that each web page delivers if you visit all of the web pages on the first page of a SERP. Nearly every page contains the right keywords and provides useful information. Minor errors remain, however. During tight competition, factors like page graphics, page loading time, and page formatting play a major role.

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How to Check Your Website’s Speed

A number of free tools are available that can tell you whether your website is slow or not.

Google's PageSpeed Insights is my personal favorite. The results are presented clearly and it's easy to use. Additionally, suggestions are categorized into "should fix", "consider fixing", and "passed rules".

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What Makes Your Website Slow

Ads

While monetizing a high-traffic website is a good idea, too many ads can slow down your site. Check how many ads there are on each page. Advertisements should not compromise the user experience.

Messy Code 

Adding as many features as you can to a page may seem appealing, but unnecessary elements can make your page much larger than it needs to be. You can compress code by removing unnecessary elements, which will make your site load faster. 

Flash content 

You may notice a slowdown on your website when you use Flash content. Flash is also outdated. Instead, try using HTML5 for interactivity.  

Unoptimized images 

The biggest problem with large pages is that they take a long time to load, and the worst culprit is unoptimized images. In order for a page to load quickly, its size should be less than 500 kb. Yet you still need good images to make the page effective, don't you? This issue can be solved by optimizing the images on your page. An optimized image can be smaller without sacrificing its quality.

Poor hosting 

The performance of the server is heavily influenced by the quality of the web host. Choosing a cheap host means compromising many things. Shared servers are usually offered by low-priced hosts, which means your page will load slowly due to other sites in a queue. 

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Two Ways to Increase the Speed of Your Webflow Site

If you want to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and conversion, there are two foolproof ways to do it.

Reduce the size of your site - larger sites take longer to download.

Webflow in particular makes it easy to preview a different device view in real-time, then change the background image to a smaller version (one with a lower resolution and therefore a smaller file size). Webflow intelligently propagates image changes down to smaller devices, so a background image set for a tablet will also automatically be set for phones.

Faster hosting - a faster, more responsive server reduces the time between visitors pressing enter and the page loading

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Amazon AWS, which offers high-performance servers around the globe, is one of the best hosting providers for these purposes. Webflow's own one-click hosting is built on top of Amazon AWS's CDN servers. A great competitor of AWS is DigitalOcean despite having fewer regions. The setup of websites on Amazon and DigitalOcean requires more technical expertise than smaller boutique hosts. However, they are both much faster and better distributed than smaller boutique hosts.

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Finally…

We work so hard on keyword research and writing great content, but it will all be for nothing if your page is not designed to fit the audience's interests. Slow-loading pages are rarely welcomed by users. An excellent user experience and successful digital strategy depend on an impressive page speed. To ensure your content reaches the right audience on time, make sure your page loads in an enticing amount of time.