La loading rate of a website is directly related to the user experience: at a higher speed, users have a more fluid and comfortable navigation. Although it may seem like one of many features of a site, the truth is that it has a great impact for your visitors.
Here factors such as the hosting, the layout of the page, and even the code itself.
Loading speed: conversions and SEO positioning
For businesses, an optimized site means that visitors to their pages have more likely to become customers, and even come back in the future.
Meanwhile, a slow website tends to have a negative impact on the user, which favors the abandonment rate and decreases the chances of visitors converting into buyers. On the other hand, positioning in Google is affected by this loading speed. For some years now, Google has incorporated speed into numerous factors including positioning algorithm.
This means that a website that loads slowly will have a negative factor that will worsen its positioning in the search results. Thus, both their visibility and their traffic decrease. In terms of online businesses, we can see it as a radical decrease in its reach.
Hosting: one of the pillars of a good loading speed
Websites are made up of files that are stored on a server. This is what is known as hosting: the storage service for all the files on your website and from where the content of the website is served to the users who visit it.
Hosting directly influences loading speed of a page because it is what determines the maximum speed of transfer of the files from the server to the device of the users.
Therefore, the main thing is to find a good hosting that meets the following characteristics:
- With NVMe SSD drives. NVMe SSD drives are up to 10 times faster than traditional hard drives and normal SSDs. Thus, a hosting service that provides them with a significantly faster loading speed.
- 24×7 technical support. Be sure to choose a service that offers technical support at any time and in your language to help you overcome any incident that arises as soon as possible.
- Choose a control panel that is easy to manage. Control panels such as Plesk or cPanel are the most used on the market due to their ease and flexibility. Make sure that your hosting has one of them or another similar one.
- Backup services and other extras. It is always good to choose a hosting that has complementary services such as automatic backups, domains, SSL certificates and any other that contributes to having a website that is comfortable to use.
Additional recommendations to improve speed
There are also other actions that significantly improve the performance of a page. They are small, but the sum of all of them generates a great change.
- Optimize the images. Images are one of the heaviest elements of a web page, so look into options like reducing their size, changing the format, and even using compression tools that maintain quality.
- Use a CDN. A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that stores copies of your files and delivers them from the location closest to the user, which decreases transfer time.
- Reduces the number of HTTP requests. Each file on a web page, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, requires a separate HTTP request. You can reduce requests by keeping only the files you need.
- Minimize the code. Remove unnecessary or redundant code from your website. Also consider relocating certain parts of the code to load the most important first to further improve the user experience.