Visitors to your website are drawn there due to the hard work you have put into important details such as search engine optimization (SEO), premier design or content and, of course, a quality product or service. With these factors in place however, your visitors will not stay long on a website that is slow loading. The following are five important tips that not only will help speed up your website load times, they will help ensure your visitors stay on your website to view the products or services you have so painstakingly laid out for their review.
1. Check the speed of your bandwidth by conducting a trace route test. If it’s running slow, you should consider investing your hosting budget in a hosting company affiliated with a larger bandwidth provider, such as Level (3) Communications, MCI-Verizon, AT&T, Sprint or Mizma, that typically means they can provide a larger amount of bandwidth that can more easily handle large amounts of traffic.
2. The selection of a hosting company that uses quality equipment so that hosting services are optimized for the subscriber is very important for fast page load times. Many smaller web hosting companies attempt to reduce operating cost by using less efficient equipment, a factor that will affect your website and your visitors. Depending on your needs, especially if you hope to attract and keep large numbers of visitors, selecting a host that uses high quality equipment will benefit your business and website by providing a quality return on your investment.
3. Choosing a hosting company that is close to your location will help improve load times. Hosts at a distance of over forty miles can slow page load times. A ping test is a great tool for determining host location and will easily give you the information you need to determine if your host is within acceptable distance limits. Keeping your hosting business with a company that is closer to your location will help increase load times and avoid customer frustration with pages that have drawn them in but take a long time to view.
4. Image optimization is an often overlooked aspect of web design. The right mode of image compression is important on pages with a heavy image load. Choosing GIF images whenever possible, for example, as well as highly compressed JPGs will help pages load more quickly. On the other hand, choosing PNG files or bitmap images will drastically slow load times simply due to their size.
5. By enabling PHP caching, it will help your website load quickly for return visitors. This feature is especially important for return visitors because it tells your browser to store web page content once it has been viewed. This is a major factor for visitors who are bringing return business and revenue to your website.
Summary…
The initial investment in choosing a quality hosting company close to your location, which is properly connected to companies that will optimize their bandwidth provisions, and uses high quality equipment are all tools at your disposal. These tools, along with image optimization and PHP caching are choices that cannot be taken lightly when the goal is fast load times and happy, returning customers.
Brian Flores is an online marketing specialist at InMotion Hosting, one of the top virtual private server providers in North America. He works with an awesome team of writers to create useful tutorials on web hosting support. You can read those tutorials by visiting InMotion Hosting’s Support Center.
Tweet