When it comes to providing users with an optimized experience, along with ensuring your website ranks higher on Search Engines determines how fast your site loads on different browsers and devices can make a significant difference when it comes to page ranking & showing up in search results. If your website is an eCommerce business, page speed should be a high priority as a fast website leads to happier customers, which ultimately will lead to higher conversion rates because a client can make an order efficiently without any lag time. However, it is important to note that if your website is image-heavy or if you have a large collection of products, the performance of your website may suffer. If page speed is a concern, read on for a few quick tips to help reduce site load speeds and increase user accessibility.
Compress and Resize Your Images
If a website is image-heavy or uses hi-res images it can help reduce site load times by using JPG or JPEG files instead of PNGs for smaller file sizes. There are a variety of free and paid platforms that can resize and scale your images to decrease file sizes and reduce the time it takes for a page to load on the front end. Some options might be Photoshop, Photopea, Pixlr, or Canva. In addition, there are a few different plugins that help to compress images sitewide, including TinyPNG for WordPress websites.
Add Caching & Minimizing Plugins
Caching is a powerful tool that helps store certain data about websites, typically images, that allowing for faster loading on the front end. Utilizing Caching plugins like W3 are beneficial as they help to capture certain parts of the site for faster loading, which reduces the overall load speed for users if data is already saved from the site. If you are using a Shopify website, features such as lazy load help can help to improve a lagging site. Lazy load is a feature that loads images as the user scrolls down rather than trying to load the entire site as soon as they land on the page. This is a simple feature that can be enabled at any time, which saves responsive versions of the images used throughout your site, which greatly reduces the strain on a site.
Consolidate Plugins
If your website is built with WordPress, you might be familiar with plugins and how they can help accomplish a variety of tasks. Depending on which type of plugin is used, it can range from barely using any space to taking up a considerable amount of server memory. If you notice that your plugins are taking up a lot of space, or if your site is loading slow, it may be time to look into consolidating plugins that do similar tasks or look into similar plugins that will take up less space on the server and take less time to load.
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