The loading speed of your website has a tremendous effect on the visitor's experience. Around 40% of the users will leave a page that takes three or more seconds to load.

In fact, a delay of one second in page load time can lead to a 7% loss in conversions and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Thus, your website must be optimized with an optimum page load speed to hold your visitor's interest for longer. A faster website is a primary requisite to provide an elating involvement to the user and to rank high on search engines.

Here are the best four ways to improve the loading speed of your website:

1- Choose the Right Hosting Option

One of the reasons for the slow loading speed of your page is not choosing the right hosting plan.

Usually, you get four options to choose from:

• Shared hosting
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated server
• Cloud hosting

Shared hosting is a great and cheapest option for beginners. However, it is not the right option when there is a spike in traffic on your site and other sites using the same server.

Thus, as the shared hosts tend to overcrowd their servers, it impacts the speed and performance of your site.

By opting for a dedicated and reliable hosting option, you will have more space to organize your resources and configure your website according to your preferences.

2- Reduce HTTP Requests

HTTP requests are made by a client on a web browser to a web page on a server to access resources and information. Thus, more files lead to more HTTP requests, and bigger files imply longer HTTP requests.

In turn, a huge number of HTTP requests can slow down the load time of your web page.

Around 80% of a web page’s load time is spent on downloading different components of the page, including images, scripts, flash, and stylesheets.

Here are the ways to minimize the HTTP requests:

• Check the current number of HTTP requests made by your site. Use Google Chrome’s Network panel to check these numbers. It will also help you to analyze the files that are taking the longest time to load.
• Remove unwanted images. You can remove those images that are not contributing much value.
• Reduce the file size of the images. Use high-quality images with compressed file size. It is best to keep the image file size less than 100 KB. You can use tools, such as Squoosh and TinyPNG to compress your images.
• Load JavaScript files asynchronously as it allows your website content to render multiple page elements simultaneously.
• Combine all CSS files as each CSS file adds to the number of HTTP requests.

3- Use Finteza Lighthouse Report

Before ranking your website, Google tracks the website performance. It gives importance to the page experience and promotes websites that take less time to load and are easy to interact with.

Thus, a website that offers exceptional user experience is ranked higher on the search results.

To analyze the performance of a website, Google has launched a new set of matrices known as the Core Web Vitals.

You can use the Finteza Lighthouse Report, which was recently launched to audit the Core Web Vitals, helping you to make your website faster and eliminate vulnerabilities.

Here is how Finteza Lighthouse Report helps you to improve your website load speed:

• Performance: This tool allows you to compare your site load speed with other sites. A score of 100 implies that your site loads faster than 98% of sites.
• Accessibility: It also evaluates how comfortable your users are while accessing your website. The report suggests background contrast, link styling, or heading levels to improve user experience.
• Best Practices: The report recommends best practices, such as checking browser errors, image resolution, fonts, and aspect ratio to optimize your site.
• SEO: It also suggests canonical indicators, title, and meta tags to improve your site’s search engine rankings.

4- Implement a CDN Service

It takes time to process each request when your site experiences high levels of traffic, increasing the page load time.

To decrease the load times for your users you can use a network of servers instead of just using the server that hosts your website.

By using a CDN you can cache your site on a global network of servers, which helps your users’ requests to get routed to the closest server.

For example, your original server is in the USA and you use a CDN. Now, if a visitor tries to load your site from the USA, then that visitor will access your content from one of the USA servers only. However, if visitors try to access your content from Europe, then they will load your site through a server located near to them, maybe in London.

If you are using Bluehost to host your website, you can find TrueSpeed CDN inside the control panel.

In case you want to use third-party CDN, then here are the best options:

• Cloudflare
• KeyCDN
• StackPath
• Google Cloud CDN

Final Thoughts

Improving your website load time is one of the most challenging and complex tasks. It requires the right mix of web-friendly strategies, analytical approach, and optimum understanding of web development to advance the overall performance of the site.

To achieve your site speed goals, running frequent site tests can help locate issues in your website, reduce load time and progress conversions.