Increasing Page Speed On Your Website & What Factors Affect It

So you’ve created a website that is aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. Your pictures are all in the right place and your logo sits proudly at the top of your home page. At this point, you may think all of your boxes have been ticked, but have you considered the speed at which your website loads? On paper, this detail may seem insignificant, but in reality, it is the deciding factor between your website’s functionality and usefulness. The beauty of your website is insignificant if it can’t even load quick enough to keep your customers’ attention.

Website speed has a huge impact on user experience, SEO, and conversion rates. Improving website performance is essential for drawing traffic to a website and keeping site visitors engaged.

Fear not! Proximo Marketing is here to help give you the tips and tricks you’ll need to increase your page speed and help you define what factors may be affecting it. We’ll start simple with a couple of easy changes.

Fonts

Fonts are a fun way to set your website apart from the competition. They are essential tools to branding your website and representing your business to the online community. Using the right fonts on your website is crucial to increase your site’s page speed.

Every font has a different size. Some fonts are optimized for online use and created with your page speed in mind. These fonts are few and far between. Most fonts are not created with the speed of your pages considered. Make sure to research whatever font or fonts you are considering to feature on your site. Especially when you are considering a few different fonts to be featured.

Fonts are a quick way to rack up page speed and slow down the load time of your website. This means less business for you because a slow page speed means a higher bounce rate and therefore a lower conversion rate. Conversions are the biggest reason for investing in a website in the first place, so whatever you can do to better the experience of your website is best. In the long run- fonts matter.

Here are some fonts that are widely known as “System Fonts” or “Web Safe Fonts.” They are so named because they are safe to use in the branding of your website. They are high-quality and smaller-sized fonts that can guarantee a satisfactory performance for your site.
Web Safe Fonts (System Fonts)
Arial
Calibri
Helvetica
Verdana
Courier
Georgia
Palatino
Times New Roman

Using these fonts will more than likely show a significant increase in your site’s page speed. Remember- a page speed increase means an overall conversion rate increase!

Optimize Images

Have you ever gotten a notification on your website’s management dashboard warning you about the size of an image you have uploaded? This is to better help you with the speed at which this certain page loads. We understand the appeal of a high-quality image, but making sure that your website is loading correctly is the most important priority.

Images comprise a large percentage of Internet traffic, and they often take the longest to load on a website since image files tend to be larger in size than HTML and CSS files. Luckily, image load time can be reduced via image optimization. Optimizing images typically involves reducing the resolution, compressing the files, and reducing their dimensions, and many image optimizers and image compressors are available for free online.

Optimizing your images can save you a lot of hassle and heartache down the road as you start to progress online.

Avoid Redirects

A redirect is when visitors to one webpage get forwarded to a different page instead. This usually happens when a URL for another website is linked in the text on one of your website pages. You can use redirects, but it is recommended for the sake of website speed to refrain from making them a recurring theme.

The reason for this is because redirects add a few fractions of a second, or sometimes even whole seconds, to page load time. When building a performance-optimized website, every second counts. Redirects are sometimes unavoidable, but they shouldn’t be used if not necessary.

Hopefully, this blog has been educational for the success of your website and online presence. Page speed is one of those things that is often overlooked when business owners are seeing a decrease in the success of their website. Proximo is here to help! Apply to work with us for more information and tips on how to improve the success of your website!