How to Speed Up Your Website: Top 4 Cutting Edge Technologies

Features article by Hardik Patel, Digital Marketing Consultant and Professional Blogger

Did you know that almost 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less?
Did you also know that about 40% of them would leave or abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?

Well, if you haven’t, these are some stats that describe some of the harsh realities in the digital world today and are equally applicable for an “About Us” page as well as a shopping website page.

Yes, that’s how important speed is in today’s age. It is something that can literally decide the future of your business in a matter of a few days.

Don’t believe it?
Let me interest you with some more facts:
We discussed two main issues with loading speed just a little while back. Now let’s see what their implications are:

– Even a 1 second delay in page response can cause almost a 7% decrease in conversions

– That is to say, if an ecommerce website earns around $100,000 in a day, a page delay of even 1 second can potentially cost a $2.5 million loss in sales every year.

Imagine the kind of impact it would have on your website!

If you own an ecommerce website, you probably already know of the kind of competition you have in your field and how many different alternatives to your website there are, for customers to choose over yours. For the same reason, don’t you think it is very crucial for your website to top the list on terms of speed?

Well then, here are some effective steps to take and technologies you can use to speed up your website.

4 great technologies

Let’s start with some technologies you can make use of in the upcoming years to increase the response speed of your website. As a matter of fact, aside from a business perspective, some of these technologies can actually be very beneficial to your website in terms of security and protection.

HTTP/2

This is basically a new and more efficient version of the World Wide Web Protocol. It was launched in 2015 and it is based on Google’s SPDY protocol.
It is way better than HTTP/1, which is widely used these days, mainly because it uses a binary protocol rather than a text protocol.
Secondly, HTTP/1 was better for loading one large image in a page, than several large images mainly because it was unable to cover multiple requests simultaneously. The new version; HTTP/2 totally takes care of this issue.
Thirdly, HTTP/2 compresses headers before sending the requested data to the server, which makes the transmission much easier, unlike HTTP/1.
As a result of all these benefits, the website gives you a performance boost of about 50%.

SSL Certificate

SSL or Secure Socket Layers is a security technology that encrypts the connection and the data travelling between a web server and a client or a browser. It helps in keeping the data that a customer enters into your website safe and secure from hackers and other cyber criminals, as no one else in the network would be able to read the data other than the computer it was sent to. It is something that is very important for a website these days, not just from a business perspective, but also from a security perspective.

You can easily obtain an SSL Certificate from SSL2BUYat a nominal amount. Besides, it is crucial for installing HTTP/2 as well.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is basically a set of distributed servers all over the world. These servers contain copies of the data and other content in your site like images, software, videos etc. Now the advantage of having such a distributed system of servers is that, when the data is accessed by someone on the client side, the data is loaded from the server that is closest to the visitor and therefore the loading process is a lot faster and easier anywhere in the world.
Apart from that, having an efficient CDN system, makes your website more reliable as its data is spread across several servers, which makes the job easier for your web hosting server. It is saved from a load of traffic and lessens the chances for a crash.
It can result in a website that loads faster by an average of 50% or maybe even more.

Brotli

This is an open source data compression algorithm that was introduced by Google last fall. Such data compression libraries are generally meant to reduce the size of the data that is being transported across networks.

Brotli offers a compression ratio of about 20 – 26%, which happens to be a lot better than other compression solutions. As a result, you can save about 40% of your traffic on HTML and 25% on CSS and Javascript. As a matter of fact, most website development experts prefer using Brotli because of its benefits and flexibility.

However, Brotli is only supported by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as of now.

Those were 4 effective technologies that can help you speed up your website.

Now let’s get into some steps you can take to help you in the process:

–        Optimize your images – Even though images are an important part of your website, their size and resolution can affect the loading speed of your website. However, you can have it both ways by adding pictures using optimal algorithms.
For example, you can adjust the size of the images according to the size of your page. You can also reduce the brightness level of the image. Similarly, instead of using BMP or TIFF format for images, if you stick to JPEG or PNG formats, it won’t cause problems during page loading.

–        Reduce plug-ins – Including a lot of plug-ins on your website can pose security issues and at the same time can increase the chances of website crashing. Hence, find out which plug-ins are slowing down your website and de-activate them.

Be sure to implement the above steps and install the technologies for your website. You are sure to find a big difference in your page loading and in turn your conversions.

Author Bio

Hardik patel is a Digital Marketing Consultant and professional Blogger .I have 5+ years experience in SEO, SMO, SEM, Online reputation management, Affiliated Marketing and Content Marketing. In addition, I am certified with Google AdWords. I have a great passion for digital marketing and I help small and medium-sized businesses to improve their online presence and grow their sales by Implement effective digital marketing strategies.I Implement safe marketing strategies for my client websites to gain their online business, So my client websites will never penalize. I also provide a solution to those clients also which websites are already penalized by Google and other Search engine.

Here is my twitter Handler- https://www.twitter.com/hardik260