For most website owners, page speed is a priority. Slow-loading websites not only frustrate users, but also harm their search engine rankings and cause them to lose traffic and revenue opportunities. For these reasons, it’s important to consider different ways you can boost your site’s page speed without sacrificing the quality of your content or aesthetics of your design. Here are some tips to improve your website page speed that will help you make your website faster without harming user experience or aesthetics.
Enable Browser Caching
This is an important tip for improving your website’s page speed. Browser caching allows your visitors to download elements of your site that you want them to see over and over again, so they don’t have to wait on those elements each time they return. This way, it enables faster load times when your visitors return later. There are many plugins available that help you take advantage of browser caching, but we recommend either WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.
Reduce File Size
The size of your website assets, particularly images and video, can affect page speed. Make sure you have optimised your assets as much as possible by compressing them. Since more than half of your website traffic will be via a mobile device, prioritise optimising images first since they make up most of what is being downloaded on mobile devices. When it comes to videos, keep them short and ensure that they are being displayed in a lightweight format like HTML5 or QuickTime.
Optimise Images
Whether you have one page or ten, you can’t afford for your dental website’s performance to impact your bottom line. For that reason, you need to optimise your images so they load more quickly. The same rule applies whether you use a professional image editing program or opt for a free online tool like Canva. Just remember: Compressing an image won’t always improve its quality – so take care when choosing settings and file sizes.
Increase Bandwidth
To improve your website page speed, you need to make sure your content loads faster. One easy way is to increase your bandwidth. This means that when you are uploading images or videos on your site, they should be as large as possible without making them grainy. For example, if you want a thumbnail of a video on a page, choose one that is at least 1080 pixels wide and 720 pixels high because those will load faster than smaller versions and save bandwidth in the process.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
To improve your website’s page speed, start by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is essentially a bunch of servers located around the world that host static files, such as images and scripts. When you or your users request one of these static files, a CDN will serve it from one of its servers closer to you or them—meaning less time for your users or you need to wait for an image or script file.
Remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content so that your page loads faster. The reason why you should remove them is because search engines like Google value load speed of your website, if it takes longer for a page to load you will be losing valuable ranking positions and potential traffic.
Let us help
Get in touch if you need assistance improving your dental website’s page speed. Happy optimising!
