Website speed optimisation matters, and there’s no excuse in 2020 for your financial website to have a slow loading speed. Making your website faster has a whole host of positive effects, with the main two being improved user experiences and a higher ranking in the search engines.
People expect the best when it comes to digital user experience. If your audience is faced with a website with a slow load time (on desktop or mobile), they are far more likely to turn to your competitors instead. It’s also a big factor in search engine optimisation, as Google uses page load time as a ranking factor. Essentially, a successful financial website is a fast one.
If you’re not a web developer, speed optimisation can feel overwhelming. It can include a lot of technical aspects; CSS minification, render-blocking JavaScript, and HTTP requests, to name a few. However, there are a few things that anyone can do to actively improve website speed.
We’ve put together 4 steps that you can take to increase your website speed. Each of them is simple, easy to action and effective.
1 – Use A Caching Plugin
A caching plugin can have a huge impact on load times. It serves up static HTML instead of dynamically building a page with PHP on each visit. We won’t go into the technical side as it can get complicated, all you need to know is that a caching plugin can cut page loading times in half. Most of them are easy to install onto your website backend too.
2 – Optimise All Images
A key thing to remember during speed optimisation is the smaller the site file, the faster the loading time. An average website is comprised of 50% images, which makes up the majority of your site file size. By shrinking the size of the images you can create a smaller file size and in turn a faster loading time. Again, there are a lot of plugins that will compress your website images for you.
3 – Choose A Lightweight Theme
The theme of a website is often thought of as its foundation. Due to its importance, themes can have a huge impact on a site’s load time. By choosing to go with a more lightweight theme, you can ensure that your website loads quickly, without having to sacrifice any of the other features on the site.
4 – Move Your Website To A Faster Host
Switching hosts can be a drawn-out process. However, if you’re currently using a cheaper hosting option and have done all the other speed optimisation steps with no success, it might be your only option. Outgrowing your host happens to a lot of businesses as they and the website expand. Moving to a new host might be more costly, but will be worth it in the long run.
