Part of the Website Ownership Tips video series.
Hi, how are you! If you own a website, you probably want it to load quickly, right? That’s why today’s tip is about the speed and performance of your website. We’ve been conditioned to expect websites to load nearly instantly. If a website doesn’t load in a timely fashion, are you always willing to wait? Studies show that every extra second of load time can lead to people abandoning a purchase or leaving the website entirely.
So how do we speed up a website? Lots of factors go into load time, but let’s briefly hit the top 5: hosting, videos, images, plugins and external services.
1. Hosting
The first is hosting. This is the #1 contributor to your website’s load time. It’s like the foundation of a building: it needs to be strong for everything else to succeed, and for a website, that’s the hosting server. You could do every other performance trick, but if you have one of those $5 or $10 economy hosting packages from sites like Bluehost, HostGator or GoDaddy, you’re severely capping your performance potential.
With hundreds of hosting options out there, how do you choose? Look for words like cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, managed hosting or virtual private server. These types of servers dedicate resources specifically to your website, giving you more performance and security. My clients are on cloud servers, and their websites typically load in about 1 second.
2. Videos
Next up are videos. We totally recommend using video in your marketing; it’s far more engaging than photos alone. But videos take up a lot of bandwidth. Here are 2 best practices:
- Limit the number of videos on a web page. One or two usually suffice.
- Rather than uploading your video directly to your website, put it on YouTube or Vimeo, use their video hosting servers, then embed it on your site.
3. Images
Next, let’s optimize your images. Much like videos, we like images! We want well-chosen graphics and photographs on your website. Aside from being selective, what can we do to the images that make the cut? Here are 4 quick steps:
- Resize the image down to the actual size you’ll display it.
- Save it in a web-friendly format like JPG or WebP, or PNG if you must have transparency.
- When prompted for image quality, try 5 or 6 on a scale of 1–12.
- Drop your image into a compression tool like Compressor.io or TinyPNG.com. Then you’re ready to upload it to your website.
4. Plugins
Plugins are the extra features you install on your website, like popups, newsletter signups, eCommerce, appointment booking and extra payment methods. There are over 60,000 free plugins for WordPress, and they’re great when you need extra functionality.
But it can get out of hand: install too many and you clutter your website. A good rule of thumb is to install only essential plugins, since each one adds to your load time. Do some spring cleaning, audit your site, and make sure no unnecessary plugins are slowing it down.
5. External services
Finally, consider how many external services your website calls out to. That might be Google Analytics for tracking, Hotjar for heat mapping, Facebook for advertising, or Adobe or Google for fonts. Every single service your site calls out to adds to your load time. So, like anything else, keep them to a minimum and only load the third-party essentials.
Key takeaways
If you choose high-performance hosting, optimize your videos and images, and clean up your plugins and external services (or hire a webmaster to do this for you), your website will load quicker, and hopefully more of your visitors will become customers.
I’m Leighton, and thank you for watching this Website Ownership Tip!
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
