Building a website is a process that requires constant revamping and tweaking in order to remain on top of the changes consistently occurring in SEO. There are many reasons as to why most websites end in failure, but one that can prevent a budding website from ever getting off the ground has to do with the speed at which its pages load. If your website loads slowly or otherwise is non-responsive, then this can lead to the majority of your visitors leaving and thus judging you before they ever had a chance to evaluate your content. Below, we will be outlining some ways in which you can optimize your website’s speed and avoid disgruntled, lost traffic.

Optimize Your Images

This seems simple, but many websites fail to understand just how much they can save in both space and time by optimizing their images for the web. When you are pinging the server for dozens of images, a 20% reduction in size can certainly make a difference in how quickly the page will load and properly display. You can crop any photo using a program such as Photoshop, MSPaint or Gimp, while saving large BMP files as PNGs instead will result in no loss of quality – but a drastic reduction in file size.

Remove Unnecessary Code

Unneeded elements in your site’s code can lead to slower loading times. If your code was written by a professional web developer, then chances are that it will be optimized to include no errors, extra spaces or commas. If you did it yourself, then there may be a chance that errors and unneeded elements exist. Regardless, using a minification tool will help find any of these problems and remove them from your source code. With plenty of these tools available on the internet, it makes sense to run your code through this and see if any elements need to be removed.

Create A Compressed Version

Most popular web hosting solutions offer the ability for developers and web masters to utilize a compressed version of their website, pinging the server with a faster-loading version of the website. This process varies depending on the type of server you are using, but functions very much in the end as using a ZIP file would work. Your visitors will not notice any difference in how they navigate your website (except that it will be faster), so this makes for another unobtrusive way to optimize your website’s speed.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website for speed not only will reap benefits in terms of satisfying visitors, but will also prevent select search engines from negatively ranking your pages. Considering that most elements of optimizing site speed are straightforward and require minimal effort, there is no excuse to not be implementing these strategies as part of a broader effort to improve your reception among your audience. Fortunately, optimizing images, removing unnecessary code and creating a compressed version of your website can accomplish the vast majority of these optimization needs. With just a little bit of time on your part, you can quickly adopt these changes and be on firm footing for other site optimization efforts in the future.