Your site needs to load fast. Google is using site speed as one part of their algorithm, so site speed is vital to your search engine ranking. It’s also important for a good user experience, especially on mobile.

If your site isn’t loading quickly, there a lot of things that can be done. I know people get concerned that they need a full new site to improve the site loading speed. But, luckily we can often optimize the site to keep your existing site but have it load much more quickly.

1. Hosting: Your hosting is the first place to look.  Make sure that you are on business class hosting and your account is configured correctly.
2. Optimize Images: Graphics are what can really make a site look great and connect with your target audience. But, graphics can be a large contribution to site slowness.  We want to integrate Lossless Image Compression to make sure your graphics are small in file size and load quickly.
3. Browser Caching: This tactic saves files and assets to the visitors local browser so they don’t have to be loaded over and over again.  Browser caching works especially well if site visitors are going to your web site repeatedly and if they are reading multiple pages.
4. Asset Minification: Minification is a process of removing all the extra data from the code that powers your web site.  This includes “extra” characters like spaces and line breaks.  So, minified code can be read faster by the browser.  This also reduces bandwidth needs which is very important for sites that get significant traffic.
5. Defer & Asynchronous Loading: This means that we don’t load the full page when a visitor first opens it.  Page elements, code and images are loaded as they are needed.  You can see this when you are looking at an image gallery or product listing and the thumbnails appear as you are scrolling down the page.  This tactic works very well for pages with lots of assets, like carts, and for long pages.
6. Server Side Caching: There are a variety of tactics that we can implement on the server side to optimize a site to load quickly.  We can do database caching, implement third party caching tools and change how database queries are made.

This is only a partial list of the optimizations and tactics that we can do to improve your web site loading time.  If you need help evaluating your site’s load time or making it faster, just let us know.