man is boredIf one of your goals is to best optimize your site for search, then you might be aware of the importance placed on having your pages load quickly. There are a variety of good reasons why you’ll want to make sure this is so, among them…

  1. It’s undeniably a Google ranking factor.
  2. Average human attention span is down to 8 seconds.
  3. The typical retail site loads at more than 7 seconds, and it’s estimated that even a one-second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

With these reasons and many more, it’s high time we take this seriously. Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can get your pages to come up faster.

5 Ways to get your pages to load more quickly

Google PageSpeed Insights – Google actually gives you a free solution for discovering a lot of the issues you might be facing with regards to slow loading pages. It’s called PageSpeed Insights, and it’s free. It will see why your pages aren’t arriving quickly and suggest solutions to fix that.

Not too many redirects – Too many redirects on your pages can cause the server to make extra http requests it doesn’t need to. Make sure you don’t have any faulty, old, or otherwise unneeded redirects clogging up the arteries.

Unplug some plugins – You might have far too many plugins, and some of them may be gumming up the works when it comes to having your pages load quickly. Eliminate any you aren’t using, and test the ones you are to determine if they are optimized well. (Are they making your pages slow down)

Optimize images – Take the time to ensure your images are compressed to the smallest size possible, and that you are using JPEGs whenever possible. Also make sure you remove image comments.

Enable page compression – Enabling compression on your pages, thereby reducing their size and allowing them to be loaded far faster is a very good idea. This is best accomplished with a tool called Gzip, and can result in page loads 70% faster!