Being in the Haddonfield NJ Website Design space has shown us some valuable insights when it comes to website design. Chief among them is the importance of website speed. Google has cited website speed as one of their most important ranking factors among others like mobile device functionality, ease of use, and domain authoritativeness. We recently wrote about some of the best basic ranking factors for SEO. Website speed is also a big factor in your conversion rate otherwise known as the number of sales your website generates relative to the number of users that visit. Walmart recently conducted a study of how likely their users are to purchase based on the site loading time the user experienced. It was found conclusively that lower loading times led to more sales. If your website is having loading time issues and you are losing customers because of it, we are here to help. If you want to see how fast your website is you can head over to our blog post on conversions and website speed. There is a lot that you can do to improve loading times, here are the 4 best ways to improve your website speed:
Provided by Walmart.com
Use Browser Caching Plugins
Local browser caching is your friend when it come to improving your website speed. Local browser caching is when a browser like Google chrome can save certain elements of your website for users so when the first come to your page parts are already loaded for them. Far too often we have seen Haddonfield NJ Website Design failing to utilize this incredible resource. Our advice will apply mostly to WordPress websites, but you should still be utilizing browser caching for any type of website. With non-WordPress websites, site speed improvement is often too complicated to accomplish without the help of a web design professional. If you’d like some help, you can head over to our quote page.
As for the WordPress website, there are a number of steps that you can take yourself to improve load speeds and therefore increase your search engine rank and conversions. The best way to achieve this is with browser caching plugins. There are a lot of these plugins and we encourage you to do your own independent research to find the best fit for you. When we are looking to improve WordPress website speed we rely on the WP rocket plugin. We’ve found that it fulfills a multi-roll position when it comes to site speed as it will also help to fix coding issues that you would have a lot of trouble fixing yourself without the plugin. That being said here are a few other alternatives if you don’t want to go with our suggestion:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/cache-enabler/
Captured by Developers.google.com/
Using one of these plugins should have a clear and immediate effect on your website speed. Browser caching is a great first step to improving your website speed. Some of you may even have your speed issues entirely solved just by this method. But, sometimes browser caching just isn’t enough to take that Haddonfield NJ Website Design to the next level.
Resize your Images
Your images may not be the correct size for the container they are in, that’s a big issue. Image sizing and aspect ratios are one of the most confusing aspects of web design for people to grasp, from our experience in Haddonfield NJ Website Design. We can’t stretch a poor quality image to fit in a container that will look good on your web page, so us and a lot of the other people in Haddonfield NJ Website Design need to put in larger pictures so that a section looks good on every screen type. Unfortunately, sometimes this means that an image is going into a container that is far smaller than the image. We’ve seen instance where an image that is 3340×4050 pixels is placed in containers that have a maximum display size of 560×560. You can read more about image sizes here. When you place a larger image in smaller container most modern websites will auto-format it to size based on your device (A cell phone will see a smaller version than a desktop computer). In this day and age the largest size you need to worry about for most images is 1920×1080 and that is for the large “hero” image that you see on the front page of websites. If you have an image that is 3340×4050 we strongly suggest you cut it down to around 1920×1080 pixels.
Aspect ratios are the next challenge you will face in resizing your images, you need to make sure the aspect ratio of the image isn’t adversely affected. Aspect ratio just refers to the ratio of the width and height of your image, our preferred image aspect ratio for full length images is 16:9 or 1920×1080. Square images, for example, will have an aspect ratio of 1:1. You can read more about aspect ratios here.
When you have a image that is 3340×4050 and you want to move it down to 1920×1080; you need to be aware that they are different aspect ratios. The sloppy fix for this can be done using an image editor (we recommend paint.net) to change the width while preserving the aspect ratio (which shows up as a checkbox in the paint.net software). Or you can take the slightly harder route and try to crop the image until it is the desired size and aspect ratio. Manually cropping will be more time consuming, but more efficient for your loading times. You can achieve this by cropping down to a size that is close to the 16:9 aspect ratio we mentioned earlier and using the paint.net resizing tool to set the exact size to something like 1920×1080. Congratulations, you now have images correctly sized for their container! But, there is still more to be done to improve those loading time.
Created using Paint.net
Compress your Images
Your images are the right size for the container they are in, that’s great… But it’s still not enough to put you ahead in Haddonfield NJ Website Design. Image compression is your next step, and if you are using our “direct image editing” method, it is very easy to do. In paint.net you can choose the “save as” option and make sure to change the file type to JPEG. With your file type changed you will now see a slider that is a percentage scale; this is your image compression amount. The quality of the image will be decreased to 90/100 if you choose that “90” option. 90% compression is our personal recommendation but you can go as low as 75% with most pictures without any major consequences.
If the previous method is too complicated or you are just not a computer person, you can use a image compression website. Image compression websites work much the same as the previous method, but they will do it for you. You can find a huge number of websites offering this service but our personal recommendation is the Toolur compression tool. We have used it for clients in the past and it is one of the most reliable tools on the market. Try a few and see which works best for you!
The last step to improving website speed in your Haddonfield NJ Website Design is using a CDN. First we should explain what a CDN is; CDN stands for content delivery network. A content delivery network is essentially servers that are placed in other geographic locations which make it so when someone from California looks at your Haddonfield NJ Website they will get the same speed as someone in New Jersey. Your content delivery network has your website ready to go on their private server, so they can provide that information at a moments notice. You can get more information on how CDNs work here.
CDN’s are different than the other options we’ve given you in that they are a third-party paid service. You can have a perfectly optimized website and never need to use a CDN, but if you want that last little shove of page speed, use a CDN. CDNs are the of the least accessible of the options when it comes to increasing your website speed, but can be very beneficial if your users are spread out among the United States or even around the world. If you’re local and just focused on Haddonfield NJ Website Design you shouldn’t actually need to pay for a CDN. If you have the expendable funds and want to increase your conversions by that last few percentage points; then CDNs are your best bet at capturing those conversions that just seem to be slipping through the cracks on your website. If your website speed is fine and you still have trouble with making more sales check out our blog on Conversion Optimization.
Sourced from Wikipedia
Haddonfield NJ Website Design Conclusion
Website speed is important for everything from your conversions to your search engine optimization. One of the best steps you can take towards increasing your sales online is improving your website speed. We’ve shown you how to locally cache, compress images, resize images, and use a CDN. You should have the knowledge needed to increase your website speed! Not only will more people buy when your website loads better, more people from Google will find your website as a result of the rank boost from your improved loading speeds. If you are more interested in conversions, you can take a look at our recent blog on Conversion Optimization. Hopefully we have managed to help you reduce your page loading times to something more reasonable. We understand that this can get a little complicated and that we may not have covered every possible reason for your website’s speed issues. If you have taken these steps and are still having speed issues or suffering from poor loading times; there is probably a more fundamental (codebase related) problem with your website. We can take a manual look for you, head over to our Quote page and ask for some help! We are Caveni, leaders in Philadelphia Web Design, just trying to share our knowledge to help everyone out. Watch the video below for a quick recap on what we have gone over.
