10 Ways to Increase Your Website Speed

A fast website for your property is key to a seamless user experience that brings in bookings. Think about it. What do you do if a website takes too long? Most likely you either a) abandon it or b) click into something else while it’s loading and possibly forget to come back. Potential guests do this too. Website speed matters. Make sure yours is fast enough to keep guests on your site to make a booking!

You need to know where issues lie in order to make improvements. There are many free online page speed tests, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Various testing tools grade performance differently, so run your website through a few of them at different times and locations to identify recurring weaknesses.

This isn’t a task you should do once and forget about. Incorporate it into your maintenance routine as any adjustments you make to your site can change its speed.

When you’re running tests and making necessary changes, you need to remember the mobile version of your site as well. Mobile sites typically run slower than desktop ones, but that doesn’t mean you should take it for granted, especially now that Google uses mobile-first indexing. Your mobile site is key to your SEO!

TTFB (time to first byte) is however long it takes for your site to begin to load and has a significant impact on your search rank. Ideally, TTFB should be at or below 200 milliseconds.

Before a site can begin loading, the browser needs to contact the server, and the server needs to respond. If your TTFB is lower than it should be, you may have a server problem.

To fix this, you can pursue a few different options. Many people rent server space from a hosting provider; switching your provider or going with a higher-priced option, such as cloud or managed hosting, can improve your speed. In addition, your hosting provider should have a data center close to the majority of your audience.

Something called a DNS (domain name system) comes into play here as well. This is a special kind of server that connects your domain name to your IP address (basically, it identifies who you are on the internet when someone asks). A slow DNS increases your load time.

Lastly, if you have users around the world, consider a content delivery network (CDN). A content delivery network ensures that there are copies of your site across local servers—not just one server in a galaxy far, far away from your audience—and thereby improves your speed.

Caching is storing either part or all of your website in a place where it’s easier to access later. There are a few different types of caching:

• Browser Caching – This tells a browser to keep information on a local hard drive so that when someone accesses the website a second time, it does not have to download that information again.
• Edge Caching – Keeps files on a server closer to your audience (see the above section on content delivery networks).
• Object Caching – Enables the server to remember certain queries without accessing its database.

Browser caching makes the site faster for repeat visitors, and object caching is helpful if you have dedicated hosting or a virtual private server. Object caching can backfire on shared hosting.

Think of caching like how you store items in your purse. You don’t keep the most important stuff down at the bottom with the crumpled receipts and old mints. There are plenty of plugins that can help with this!

Reducing file sizes on your website also reduces loading time. This is where file compression comes in. Compressing these files means combining multiple files into one smaller file, which is easier to zoom around the web. One of the most common ways to do this is via Gzip, though there are others.

Having files, graphics, plugins, and effects that you no longer use is a drag on your site speed. Clean out your database and conduct regular maintenance to streamline your website. But before removing any elements, be sure to analyze which ones visitors click on and engage with!

Think twice before you add fancy effects as well. They may look neat, but they add to your load time and don’t always offer a lot of practical utility. (Does that image really need a bounce animation?)

Even if you aren’t removing anything or leaving something out, you can still rearrange content and elements to improve site speed. For instance, it’s better to break longer content into multiple pages, display short excerpts with links to the complete text, and put comments in a separate location from the page content itself.

Larger images make your load time longer, so take a minute to crop them to the right size. Use JPEG files when possible as those tend to be smaller than PNGs. Finally, compress images (and videos) for your website. There are plugins that can handle this function as well as software you can use to prepare files prior to uploading (Adobe, anyone?).

Lazy loading is a useful technique for image-heavy websites. This means that not all images load immediately, only when the user is supposed to see them on the screen. Images the user has to scroll down to see won’t be loaded until they actually do that. This speeds up the overall load time.

Steer clear of hotlinking. Hotlinking is when you link directly to an image from another website. It slows your site speed, and you may not have permission to use that image. You can prevent others from hotlinking your own images by disabling right clicks, adjusting the .htaccess file, or using a CDN or plugin that stops this.

Like images, videos can harm your load time if done poorly. They hog server space and cause bandwidth problems if too many users watch them at once. In addition to compressing video files, consider hosting your videos offsite and embedding them on your website.

JavaScript is a programming language that tells your website what to do; think of it as a set of instructions. These instructions can be loaded either in order or all at once. All at once is better because it prevents one slow piece from slowing down everything else. You can also specify that any slow pieces load last.

Shrink your JavaScript files and go through them to see if there are any you can cut. Again, your website doesn’t need all those animations.

An HTTP request is what occurs when a website element, say an image, script, or stylesheet, needs to be downloaded from the server. The user’s browser makes the request, and the server downloads that element. The more of these requests you have, the more time it takes. Are there elements that go unused or files that take a particularly long time to load (that you may want to get rid of)?

A redirect is when you arrange for users who enter a certain URL to be taken to a different page instead, for instance, if you combined two blog posts into one, you could have users who click on the old URLs be taken to the latest version.

Redirects make for clunky design, add HTTP requests, and slow your site speed, so you should remove them as often as possible. Can you update an old page instead of creating a new one?

Use these tips to make sure your property’s website is ready to go when potential guests need it—not ten seconds after. The World Web Technologies web design team can help you get it right from the start with a redesign that prioritizes functionality and boosts bookings. Contact us for a free, no-obligation quote.