4 tips to make your website load faster

Etienne Champagne

13.9.21

Why is website speed important?

Well, there are two main reasons why speed is important.

1. A ranking factor

Google admitted that site speed is part of their ranking algorithm.

Seriously — you want to be near the top.

OK, that's not the only ranking factor, but Google rarely openly recognizes what their algorithm is about, so it's worth taking note.

2. People prefer faster websites

Think about your own experiences — how many times did you hit the “back” button on a very slow website? When a site takes too long to load, the conversion rate is greatly affected.

4 Tips to Make Your Website Load Faster

1. Optimize images

Make sure your images aren't bigger than they should be, that they're in the correct file format (PNGs are generally better for graphics with fewer than 16 colors), and JPEG images for photos. Ideally, an image should not weigh more than 200 kb. You can use the free tool Reduce Images to compress your images without losing quality.

2. Your web hosting

The role that hosting plays is huge in relation to the loading time of your website. Over time, we tried several companies. We quickly realized that popular companies like GoDaddy, BlueHost & Hostgator offer poor hosting quality. Their saturated servers slow down the performance of your website enormously. The quality of the technical support service leaves much to be desired, although it has improved in recent years (but not enough).

That's why I highly recommend using SiteGround. Their support responds very quickly, whether by Live Chat, phone or email. Our website (La Ruche) is hosted on their servers and all our customers by the same token.

3. Browser caching plugin

Browsers cache a lot of information (style sheets, images, JavaScript files, etc.) so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn't need to reload the entire page.

If your website is made on WordPress, several Plugins are offered. We use SG Optimizer for our sites. Very easy to use and we have good results with it.

Here are some cache plugins:

4. Use GTmetrix to test the speed of your site

GTmetrix is a free tool that allows you to find out what is slowing down your website in great detail. We use it before putting our websites online to make sure they all load under 3 seconds.