Website speed and responsiveness are factors which are increasingly important for all websites across the world. There are many reasons why it is important to have a site that functions and responds properly and according to users’ needs and requirements. Whether your website sells clothes, payroll software or simply a service such as consultancy, engaging users and search engine ‘spiders,’ which crawl [read and analyse] all websites is fundamental to your online and sometimes even offline success.
There are various factors to consider with regards to the speed of your website and understanding this could be the difference between your business ‘breaking even’ and potentially thriving and becoming an unrivalled success.
Speeding Things Up
How you address site speed issues will very much depend on which content management system (CMS) your website uses, who, how and where your website is hosted and whether or not you have the knowledge and knowhow to implement the various actions needed to speed things up.
Content Management System (CMS) – Different CMS’ allow for different permissions for everyday users when it comes to sitespeed. For example, WordPress allows you to do more than Wix or SquareSpace, but with the right development input, Drupal can thrive too. Consider speaking to a website developer before choosing your CMS
Hosting – Your website needs to ‘live’ somewhere and where it lives will be a strong factor for how it performs. Many websites find themselves hosted on huge and commercial platforms which work well for very small sites such as personal blogs but which are not suitable for businesses’ needs and websites. Consider researching dedicated server space which could help propel your website’s speed to new heights. Not having to share server space with other websites will mean that your site can make use of all of the server space it needs for things like images, videos and content.
Page Loading and Rendering – As well as where the site loads from (in the case of hosting), how and the precise nature of how individual pages on your site load is an equally important factor. Many websites retain render blocking on their sites which often slow things down. Render blocking is only really needed for sites that do not have much server space. this blocking of page rendering means that pages will loan slower and in layers to allow for the server to respond in cases of slower hosting. However, removing this script [code] makes for a much faster page loading experience
Error Pages – All websites will, at one time or another play host to 404 response pages. These are pages which are effectively dead ends; links point to their URL, but there is no page existing with the URL label in question. Easily fixed using 301 redirects and implemented via your website’s htacess file, consider redirecting the broken links [URLs] to their closest equivalent page. By pages not being flagged as ‘broken,’ users will enjoy a much better experience on your site and will be able to naturally follow a user journey, rather than reaching unfortunate ‘dead ends’