You will find endless ways to reduce the loading time of your website if you try to find some. Generally, reduction of load time is regarded as a technical issue. In fact, the entire scope of a new field like technical SEO is based on optimizing loading speed.
Every time someone asks how to reduce the load time of a website, the tips and suggestions are many. While it is nice to know a hundred different ways to reduce the loading time of your website, deploying all these methods is very challenging for a non-tech professional.
Generally, it is SEO professionals who try to find out how to reduce the load time of a website. Since most SEOs are not tech savants, they cannot deploy most tech-heavy ways to increase loading speed.
Thus, we try to cover all the simple ways to reduce the loading time of your website. Questions such as how to decrease page load time in WordPress, Wix, and other CMS & custom websites will also be covered.
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1. Choose the Right Hosting Plan
Out of the many ways to reduce the loading time of your website, none will work as well as choosing the right hosting plan. If you decide to set aside a good amount of money for your hosting plan, you can stop worrying about knowing how to decrease the loading time of a website.
Generally, companies think of web hosting as an essential utility. Thus, they look for the cheapest way out when choosing a hosting plan. This sets them on a collision course with various website loading speed problems.
The solution? It’s really simple. People running websites must choose the right hosting plan for their website, not the cheapest one in the market.
2. Significantly Reduce the Loading Time By Compressing Images
One of the more popular ways to reduce the loading time of your website is image compression. Images come in many formats. PNG files are generally the largest, while JPEG and WebP are the smallest. Thus, a simple way to increase loading speed is by using images in JPEG and WebP formats while avoiding PNG.
If you have a website that already has many hundreds of uncompressed images, there is a simple solution. WordPress plugins like Smush allow websites to compress all images with a simple click of a button.
Other CMSs also have their own plugins to compress images. Thus, one answer to the question of how to decrease loading time in WordPress is image compression through plugins.
3. Use AMP to Reduce the Loading Time
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is a simple way to think about optimizing the speed of mobile web-pages. AMP generally cuts down on all external scripts of a website and loads the main body of a webpage on mobile devices.
For many websites, AMP is a great equalizer as it makes sure websites with cheap hosting plans also get a reasonably good loading time. If you are using WordPress, all you need to do is install an AMP plugin. That’s it. Your mobile loading speed will then be optimized by a few lines of AMP code.
AMP is an open-source. If you have a custom-developed website, you can integrate AMP directly into your source code and ensure fast loading for incoming visitors.
4. Take a Compression Audit
You may not think of file compression as one of the best ways to reduce the loading time of your website. If you are of such an opinion, you’re not alone. In fact, many of those who do run websites don’t actually think of file compression as a solution. This is because they think it’s too tedious and doesn’t save enough seconds from the loading time.
For all such people, a compression audit is a simple solution. A compression audit helps people running websites see how much time they could save from the general loading time.
Tools like GIDNetwork are very effective at predicting the amount of space and time a website can save with file compression.
5. Allow Caching on Web Browsers
Allowing browsers to cache assets of your website helps enhance loading speed many times over. After all, why should you make regular visitors download the same website assets repeatedly? A simple solution is to allow caching and allow browsers to load websites from previously downloaded assets.
Every website worth its salt caches key assets in the device storage. For WordPress websites, implementing caching is very simple.
WP Rocket is a plugin that allows website caching at the click of a button. Thus, if you’re asking how to decrease the load time of the website using WordPress, website caching and WP Rocket are effective solutions.
If you’re using a custom-developed website, you should consult resources on Apache Caching, Nginx Caching, and IIS Caching for website caching.
6. Consider Using a Content Delivery Network
There are many reasons why a content delivery network is a very simple solution to enhancing website loading time. Generally, when a website is being loaded, there is a good chance the webserver is located far away from the client.
Distance is also a deciding factor is webpage loading time. For example, let’s say you’re sitting in a cyber café in Tokyo. Now consider two situations. In the first situation, you request a webpage which is stored on a server in Kyoto. In the second situation, you request a webpage stored on a server in Rio de Janeiro. There is a good chance for the first webpage loads quickly while the second one is slower.
How can a website counter this problem? A content delivery network distributes the assets of a website across different server locations around the world. This allows for faster loading no matter where a client is sitting in the world. For WordPress users, there are many CDN options to choose from such as MaxCDN and Cloudflare.
7. Use Third-Party Platforms to Host Bigger Files
These days, websites don’t just write text-only blog posts. We are seeing many companies invest in video content. In fact, the last few years have seen a great spurt of webinars and video tutorials.
Hosting these large video files on the server of the website takes a lot of loads. Video files are generally large and hosting a ton of them on the website severely increases the loading time.
What is the solution? The answer is simple. Hosting these videos on other platforms like YouTube or Vimeo is a much better solution. Furthermore, these platforms offer much greater marketing opportunities. Websites can later embed content from these third-party platforms without actually hosting any of the large volume content.
8. Lazy Loading
Let’s say a user requests a webpage from your website. As the webpage is loading, all the content is ready except for an image at the bottom of the webpage. Is it really wise for the webpage to only appear when the image at the bottom is ready?
Isn’t it better to allow the content preceding the image to appear while the image below loads in the background?
Lazy loading allows content to be presented dynamically when it is needed. Thus, there is no waiting time which involves the downloading of every asset on the webpage.
There are many plugins on WordPress that websites can use to deploy lazy loading. It is one of the simplest ways to reduce the loading time of your website. All those wondering how to decrease the load time of the website using WordPress, lazy loading is a very efficient solution.
9. Reduce the Loading Time By Cutting Down Plugins
One of the simplest ways to reduce the loading time of your website is by removing unnecessary plugins. This is an important tip for those asking how to decrease the loading time of a WordPress website.
The problem of having excessive plugins is one plaguing WordPress users. Thanks to the immense plugin library available to WordPress users, many experiments with different plugins without account for their inherent need.
This creates a situation where many WordPress websites have stale plugins which are hardly never used. These plugins pull back the speed of a website because they continue to operate in the background despite never being used.
Thus, people running websites must always account for the plugins they use.
10. Cut Down on Third Party Scripts
Third-party scripts refer to any external program running on your website. You can check these scripts in the site information section of a webpage. Generally, these scripts come from the plugins and external code added to the website.
After checking all the third-party scripts, websites must cut down the non-essential ones. Third party scripts play a vital role in pulling down the speed of a website. This is one of the best ways to reduce the loading time of your website because it is the number one cause of slow speeds.
Thus, people running websites must optimize their use of third party scripts and restrict them to a bare minimum.
11. Use Google Page Speed Insights to Decrease the Loading Time
Google Page Speed Insights is a tool which measures the loading time of webpages on both desktop and mobile versions. It is a free tool and anyone running a website can use it.
Page Speed Insights also provides pinpoint suggestions on the areas which need optimizing to increase loading speed. Generally, this information is hard to find, but Page Speed Insights makes this task very easy.
Since this is a Google tool, an optimal score on Page Speed Insights can also mean better SEO outcomes. Thus, there is literally no reason to not consider using this tool to its best potential as it is one of the best ways to reduce the loading time of your website.
12. Choose Website Theme from Trusted Developers
WordPress users often make bad theme choices. This is partly because of an obsession to make a website appear better. Just because a theme looks good doesn’t mean it’s worth the risk from a loading speed perspective.
Thus, one of the simple ways to reduce the loading time of your website is choosing a trusted theme. Before deploying a theme, check the feedback from previous users and check the websites that use the same theme.
WordPress makes the process of running a website easy. However, it is mistakes like choosing a dodgy theme that makes a dent on the loading speed. It is thus vital for those using WordPress to not make these mistakes.
13. Minimize HTTP Requests To Reduce the Loading Time
HTTP requests are a major reason why websites take time to load. Thus, the straightforward solution is to cut down on HTTP requests.
Here’s the difficult part – how does one go about minimizing HTTP requests?
Doing this is a fairly technical job. Firstly, CSS and JS files are combined into one large file. This makes sure only one file is needed as a reference to load a page instead of many different files. Secondly, websites can use queries to only load the essential parts of a webpage. Since there are many third-party scripts on a webpage as well, queries can help cut through this mess and load only what’s necessary.
Lastly, limiting the number of images is also a neat solution. Instead of posting ten images in a blog post, a better option is to create five images wherein each is divided into two. This kind of image strategy helps reduce HTTP requests. These ways to reduce the loading time of your website help improve the website experience and maintenance cost.
Final Words – Ways to Reduce the Loading Time of Your Website
In this piece, we covered a number of feasible ways on how to decrease the loading time of a WordPress website and those developed using other methods.
If you put these ways to reduce the loading time of your website to use, you will start seeing results soon enough. Each of these methods is trusted and verified. Furthermore, the successful deployment of these methods can also help affect the SEO outcomes of any given
