Web speed has a significant impact on traffic, revenue, and conversions. According to Google research, if a page takes over 3 seconds to load, 53% of visitors from mobile phone devices leave that page. Website speed is also a ranking factor of Google search.

A slow website will negatively affect your traffic, sales, and brand image. The following are ten tips to speed up your website without moving to a new host.

1)  Uninstall the plugins you don’t need:

Plugins help you enhance the functionality of your website. However, plugins having a lot of styles and scripts can slow down your website. Use a plugin that is necessary for the functionality you are looking for.

2)  Load the tracking codes Asynchronously:

If your site is hosted on a slow server, Ad network and Analytics codes can significantly reduce your website speed. You can adjust all the codes to load synchronously to enhance your website speed.

3)  Change your website theme:

A crappy theme with a lot of bloated code can decrease your website speed. Change your website theme to light and a well-coded theme so that your website can load fast.

4)  Configure expires headers:

Your website can slow down when a browser requests the same files repeatedly. Expires headers limit the user’s browser to request files in a certain period. You can configure expires headers to store the files in their browser’s cache and request the file once in a month.

5)  Utilize Content Delivery Network:

If your website is hosted on servers in your local country, it will load fast for the local visitors while slow for visitors from the other countries. A content delivery network allows you to set the native servers. So, a visitor from the UK gets served from a server in the UK, for instance.

6)  Optimize your website images.

Large size images can severely reduce your website speed. Optimizing the images will cause fast loading and hence better user experience.

7)  Enable Gzip Compression:

When you enable Gzip compression, it will reduce the size of the files in your website back-end. Reduction in file size will result in fast loading speed.

8)   Check the database regularly:

Pingbacks, trackbacks, and post revisions increase the data stored in the database. When CMS and plugins rely heavily on a database to store the data, it reduces the speed. Regular cleanup of the database results in fast load time.

9)  Minify CSS files and JavaScript:

If your website has a lot of CSS files and JavaScript, your website directs the visitor’s browser to treat the files one by one. Minifying these files can improve website speed.

10)   Fix the broken links:

Broken links not only affect the user experience but also slow down the speed of your website. Fixing them will increase web speed and user experience.

Extra tips:

• Combine background images
• Stop others from hotlinking your images.
• Limit external requests.

Conclusion:

Website speed can be increased significantly by using these tips. However, it’s challenging to do each option one by one. You can use plugins like Wp-Optimize and Wp-Rocket if you are using WordPress. Tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix, and Google page speed can test the web speed.