The tortoise may have outsmarted the hare in the race, but don’t be fooled into thinking that all slow movers win the prize. If images on your website load at the speed of a snail you’re likely to lose customers. Online images don’t need to be the size of a football field, so contain your need for gigantic piles of pixels. Reduce images to the smallest possible size that still maintains the quality and keep your customers browsing.
Page load speed is incredibly important. A one second delay can cost your site as much as a 7% decrease in conversion rate. And on top of that, if your site is too slow, your Google rankings will be penalized.
Here are 5 of the easiest and most impactful ways you can reduce your page load speed.
- Minimize the amount of HTTP Requests: Get rid of Javascript and CSS files you aren’t using or don’t need, combine graphical images into an image sprite, and get rid of any other external http requests on your page that aren’t completely necessary. Some sites have all sorts of plugins and widgets, remember each external request to individual javascript and css files slows your site down and costs you money.
- Make all JavaScript and CSS calls External: Put all of your inline CSS styling and javascript into external files. The more of these you put directly onto the html page, the slower your site will be, not to mention this is very bad coding practice.
- Combine external CSS & JavaScript into as few files as possible: 1 CSS file and 1 Javascript file should be your goal. This also ties to the first recommendation I made of making as few HTTP requests as possible, plus it is always better to have less external files to load.
- Put Javascript file requests at the Bottom of your page: Move as many of your Javascript file requests as possible to the bottom of the page, hopefully you only have 1! This doesn’t give you a faster overall page load speed, but it does give the appearance of a faster load speed. The browser renders your website in direct order of the code, javascript files are generally not needed for the initial site presentation, so it is better to load them after the layout and images.
- Optimize your images: Reduce all images to the smallest possible size that still retain’s the original picture quality. Use Photoshop or other services such as jpegmini.com to save images into a jpeg format and then reduce the size to the lowest possible value that still retains the same quality and crispness.
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