“How to speed up your online business and reap rewards?” This is the most common question that many users keep wondering about. Many of us do not think that there is any relation between the speed of our website and conversion. Well, the truth is that, there is a strong connection between the two. Speeding up your website is a definite way to increase your sales. As per the stats, even 1 second’s delay in your page load time can further impact your page views by over 11% and decrease conversion by 7%. So it’s pretty clear that speeding up your web page is damn important. Let’s look at five ways on how to nail it for increased sales and conversion –
1. Enable compression
It is a good idea to compress your CSS and Javascript files. This will help the browser to download them faster and the users will experience increased speed both on mobile and desktop. Gzip compression is of great help in compressing the files of 200+ KB to less than 40 KB.
2. Optimized Images
Images are the major reason behind the slowing down of your website. So always optimize your images before you upload them. Especially those over 50KB needs to be optimized. You can either use Photoshop or Paint to edit them. Other way is to go for Progressive Images for JPG files as they ensure a smoother experience.
3. Enable Caching
Catching is helpful to improve the load time of the pages. It helps to reduce the load time of pages that do not experience changes too often. By enabling it at your website, the users will have enhanced experience and your server will handle more traffic as well. You can take help from free WordPress plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Fastest Cache for that.
4. Enable Keep-Alive
Keep Alive is a feature that helps to keep connections open for more than one HTTP request. It helps to reduce the latent time for subsequent requests as well. The signal for Keep-Alive is sent at definite intervals and if no reply is received, then the link is assumed to be down and there will no routing of future data. So the HTTP Keep-Alive will allow the TCP connections to stay alive. Make sure that your host has activated it for your website.
5. Minimize HTTP requests
The more number of HTTP requests will correspond to slower load time for your website. So it is wise to make as few HTTP requests as possible. You can do this by combining your CSS files, images and merging the Javascript files. The goal should be to minimize the number of HTTP requests per page. Also, streamline the number of elements on your page and combine those multiple sheets into one for faster page loading.
The above tips will help your website to load faster and also improve the overall user experience on your page. Always remember that in web business, leaner is better for your website.