Performance is a top priority for any successful website. If visitors and users can’t probably navigate, find or utilize your website, then any and all content and product offerings are moot. As such, making sure that your website operates at peak efficiency is a crucial component of site management.

Increasingly, site speed factors prominently in such considerations. With a greater share of people using mobile devices to access the internet, being able to serve up efficient and fast pages is vital to both user experience and SEO.

Fortunately, there are a few changes you can implement that’ll improve your website speed today. Let’s look at a few and show you how easy it is.

Image Optimization

How much space do images and pictures take up on your website? It’s probably more than you think. Yet the space isn’t nearly as big of a concern as the bandwidth used. Every time a visitor comes to your website, all of the images on a given page must be loaded. This slows down site speed and page loading times.

As such, image optimization solutions make sense for most online brands. Image optimization services can be found for free and can reduce the file size of images and pictures by half or more without compromising quality. Smaller file sizes means pinging your website with less unnecessary data that has to be loaded, making the user experience better.

Plugin Reduction

Those operating websites through CMS platforms such as WordPress often use plugins to accentuate the look, feel and function of the website. Some of these plugins may be permanently enabled, while others are only used at specific times. Whatever the case, the more plugins added to a website – active or otherwise – the greater the effect can be on website speed and page loading times.

Because of this, combing through your list of plugins and completely removing any unnecessary options from your CMS installation is highly recommended. Even removing just a few small plugins can ultimately have a meaningful effect.

CDN Utilization

Content delivery networks are immensely helpful tools for websites that serve audiences around the world. Because connecting to a website that is in the same city as you is inherently faster than connecting to a website halfway around the world, CDNs are used to archive copies of your website throughout various global hubs. This allows visitors to connect with your website through the closest  copy geographically-speaking.

Database Improvement

Website databases can become cluttered and messy over time. This is to be expected from the creation and deletion of pages, comments, links and other key elements incorporated into any website. Cleaning up and optimizing website databases is an essential component of improving site speed and page loading times. Database management utilities are available for free to ensure you’re pinging your website database and finding any areas where improvements can be made.

Site speed is crucial – but that doesn’t mean improving performance takes a lifetime. There are several actions you can take beginning today to improve overall loading times, many of which require a simple, one-time action to achieve the desired results.