Website speed and performance is essential to enhance the user experience. If your website is too slow, you will lose visitors, and in turn, lose potential customers.
A website doesn’t load all at once, as one page, it loads bit by bit, and there’s nothing more frustrating than a website that takes forever to load due to the layered pages and the number of images used. Visitors to your website will quickly lose patience and return to their search for another website to visit.
By boosting your website speed, you will improve your user experience, and eventually, improve your local SEO ranking.
How To Test Your Website Speed
Is there a way to make your website faster, and if so, how do you test it?
There are many tools online to test your website speed; they will show you how many files are loaded and how long it takes to load them. You will be able to see what is working and what is using resources unnecessarily.
The tool will rank your website’s speed, identify any issues, and give you recommendations to improve your speed score.
Compress Image Sizes
Images are an important element of your website; they’re the first thing visitors see when they open your website. You only get one first impression.
If you upload images to your website before compressing them, they’ll have a considerable impact on your website’s speed.
The larger the file size of the images and media you have on your website, the longer it takes for the page to load. You should optimise your images before uploading to improve your website speed and performance.
There are many tools online to help you compress your images by up to 80 percent without losing any image quality.
Minimise Your Custom Fonts
The font you use on your website will make it stand out from others; however, bear in mind that every custom font you use is another resource that your visitor has to download when accessing your website.
The fonts used should be easy to read, clear and legible, so that your visitors are able to understand your message.
You can use web-safe fonts on your website—fonts that are already pre-installed on devices—with no additional requirement to download, e.g., Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
Alternatively, you can use Webfonts, which are fonts that need to be downloaded by your browser before they’re displayed.
Don’t weigh your website down with lots of different fonts. By using only a couple of different fonts, you’ll keep your design looking great, and your website will perform at its optimal speed.
Minify HTML,CSS and JavaScript Files
Every little helps when optimising website speed for local SEO, and you can improve your website speed when you minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.
To “minify” is a programming term for the process of removing unnecessary characters and white space in your source code, and it’s one of the main methods used to reduce page load times and bandwidth usage.
You don’t have to be a web developer to minify your website files, there are lots of helpful tools out there to do the work for you, and some are free.
Set Up Your Website With Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a platform for interconnected servers that are located around the world to work together to improve website loading times.
This helps to load websites that originate on a server located in a different country. If you had to wait for the content to travel across the world, the loading time would be long and deter visitors from viewing your website.
There are many CDN solutions available; however, you should make sure that you choose the right CDN for your needs.
Speed is key to providing your users with the best experience when visiting your website, so you should make sure that the CDN servers are able to deliver your content to your end-users when needed.
You should also make sure that the CDN you choose is reliable and the servers are maintained and regularly updated so that there are no disruptions.
Reduce Your Plugins/Apps
Every plugin that you add requires resources to run, and this will lead to a slower website. You should remove all plugins that you no longer use, as not only do they slow down your website, but they can also cause security issues and make your website crash.
It’s easy to keep adding plugins; however, it’s more difficult to maintain them. Do your research and find one plugin that will cover several required features.
The number of plugins you have can be an issue, but the quality of these can also affect your page loading time. You should avoid plugins that perform remote requests and load lots of scripts, overwhelming your website pages.
Use Browser Caching
A browser cache is the storage of static files that may be useful later. The files that are stored can be images, media files, HTML documents, CSS and JavaScript files.
When someone visits your website, browser caching works by downloading elements to the visitor’s hard drive in a cache; this means the next time they visit your website, the pages will load quickly, improving the visitor experience.
Final Words
Website speed is an important factor in improving your local SEO ranking. People expect the websites they visit to be super quick and to load in seconds. If your website fails in this, potential customers will go elsewhere; you’ll lose website traffic, customers and ultimately, rankings and revenue.
You can do lots of little things that all add up to increase your website speed for local SEO massively. Spend some time planning and researching the resources available; this will pay off with increased traffic, page views, conversion rates and an increase in revenue, along with happy visitors.
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