If your website takes too long to load, whatever the reason, visitors will be less likely to stick around and give it the good look it deserves. You could put a great deal of work, time and effort into making your website great but nobody will know if they don’t stick around to see it.
Popups, other advertisements, spyware and many other things will make websites load slowly or not at all. So, to make your website load more quickly, simply look for these things and correct the problems where they exist. Some are harder than others but these three methods are easy and efficient ways to make your website load more quickly.
Cut Down on Advertising
This is the big one for most people. Unless your website is full of videos, pictures or other files, it’s going to be mostly text and links. These don’t take much space to store, nor much time to load. What slows down the loading process a lot is advertisements which will load up before the rest of the webpage.
Truth is, experienced web users are using popup blockers and other means to get around the ads anyhow. Most people don’t click on them and you will lose money, not gain it, by chasing away users with slow load times and aggressive selling techniques. The odds are good you aren’t making much money from advertising anyhow, so cut it down or cut it out to reduce load times for your website.
Rearrange Your Layout
Consider a website like Youtube which returns many results for a search, each of which has an image to go with it. If your website does something like this, loading all those little images can slow things down considerably.
You might consider cutting down the number of results per page from the current amount to something more like 10, maybe 20 at a time. Loading hundreds of images at once or doing it in sets of 10 can mean a big difference in load times for your website. Not only will it speed things up but switching the way your website looks might make it more appealing to users in other ways. Keeping your website user friendly is important.
Upgrade Your Server
Nobody said anything about these simple solutions being cheap. Putting your website on a faster, more powerful host server will make visitors load up the pages they want to see more quickly than before.
The tradeoff is obvious here as it will cost more money each month to host your website on these faster servers. It could be the simplest way to speed up your website’s loading time though – pay a little more money to have everything run a lot faster. This way you wouldn’t have to worry about your advertising or switching the setup you’re already using.
It’s on top as far as simple goes, more speed can be had after an equally quick phone call or other method of contact. If it’s not an option you can afford, that doesn’t mean you should discount it forever. In the meantime, there are other easy ways to make your website load faster.
Featured images:
- License: Royalty Free or iStock source: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/175110
This article is by Brock Hamilton of openwebsitetutorials.com, a website dedicated to giving you the instructions to make your own website, even if you’re brand new to the topic.
