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Most web owners have a query in their mind that despite the user-friendly interface and all the SEO efforts, why their website conversion rate is falling. The answer is apparent; the slow loading time of a website diminishes all the SEO efforts and hit the conversion rate. Moreover, Google already has declared that web loading time will be taken into consideration while determining a website ranking.
How Slow Website Hits SEO Efforts
Slow web page loading time increases the bounce rate on a website as most visitors leave the site when it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and it leads to low average time on each page. Due to the high bouncing rate and low average time on each page, the Google crawler is unable to view the web content and, as a result, the search engine page results (SERPs) is impacted. Thus, your SEO efforts become useless.
A Few Ideal Solutions to Improve Site Speed
Fortunately, there are numerous ways to improve page loading speed. Some of the ideal solutions are rationalized below:
Boost Image Loading Time
Online businesses cannot show the real products to the shoppers, so they display the maximum number of product images with zoom feature so that users can closely feel the product and buy it. But, when the product images take too much time for loading, it disappoints the users and they leave the site instantly. Therefore, try to use the minimum size of images so that they work well with the slow internet connection of users. Moreover, try to use the JPEG format and, upload different sizes of images on your website in order to suit all type of screen. Moreover, avoid using too small images as it may harm your business credibility and professionalism. If you are using a WordPress Site, you can use the WP Smush.it plugin for image optimization.
Choose the Best Hosting Provider
There are different types of hosting providers available online, but each works differently from each other and they have a different price range. But, choosing the cheapest hosting provider can badly affect your web loading speed because the cheap hosting providers do not have much concern about web loading speed. So, you should choose the best hosting provider that suits all your needs and provides you with optimum performance. You may choose any one from WP Engine, HostGator, Bluehost, and InMotion, as they are considered the best hosting providers.
Integrate a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Usually, in normal network infrastructure, web content needs to travel a long distance in order to reach web visitors, as a result, the web loading speed falls and all SEO efforts go useless. Thus, CDNs is used by most web owners to diminish the physical distance that the web content must travel. CDN is a network of different web servers that are distributed across several places to send content more proficiently to web users. Hosting your media files on a CDN is considered the ideal way to boost your site speed, furthermore, it can save up to 59% bandwidth and divide the number of requests your e-commerce makes. Cloudflare is considered the best out of other CDNS such as; Venture Harbour, MaxCDN, Static DNA, and Cloudwatch.
Improve Latency
In a computer network, latency is considered as a time interval which is taken by the data to go from a web server to a web browser. Latency strongly impacts the web loading time because when the distance between the web user and the web server is too long, the page takes too much time for loading, as a result, it leads to a drop in ranking. HTTP/2 here comes in the role that is succeeding version of HTTP protocol. The new version helps to reduce latency while processing a browser request as well as server push capacity.
To enable HTTP/2, https is required because major browsers are compatible with HTTP/2 with encryption. And for https, GeoTrust SSL certificates remain the best & affordable. HTTP/2 helps to limit the latency and improve the website’s overall speed and performance.
Implement AMP
Generally, most of the websites are designed in such a way that they can load quickly on all web browsers, but some web owners ignore having a mobile phone friendly web design. As a result, it badly affects the conversion rate despite having the best SEO practices on such websites. Nowadays, 65% of web surfing is done via smartphones, so Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is implemented to ensure that the website loads quickly on mobile phones. These pages are similar to your web pages, but they have stripped-down content so that the consumers only get the most vital information. If you are accessing a WordPress site, you can install WordPress Plugins to take advantage.
Minify Code
There can be many issues on the website that may slow down the web loading speed and, thus pose to a fall in web rankings. Some of the major issues are such as; large HTLM page size, uncompressed pages, too many whitespaces, HTML comments or CDATA sections. Therefore, code minifying is done to delete CDATA sections, HTML comments, whitespaces, and empty elements. Moreover, it reduces the page size, network latency and speeds up page loading time. In case of a WordPress site, you may use the Autoptimize Plugin.
Create A 301 Redirect
When there are broken links on your website, it leads to 404 or 410 errors that disappoint the user. Furthermore, it may slow down a website by taking the space which is available for real content. You can solve this issue by creating 301 redirect route so you cannot lose the potential traffic of your website due to 404 errors.
Conclusion
Slow loading pages not only waste your all SEO efforts but also hit user’s experience and conversion rate. Therefore, you should optimize your web page speed in order to take all the advantages of SEO practices.
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