How long is your attention span? What happens to you when your computer’s stuck or a website is not loading. Your hand starts to fidget. You move around the cursor, and finally, when the website loads – you release a sigh of relief.
This all happens in a matter of seconds. That’s how fast the world has become. That’s how fast your page should load. And how to ensure that your page loads faster? Read on.
Worst Case Scenario
Let’s look at it from the bigger picture. What happens once you start to have a slow and sluggish webpage? All your new viewers will be unimpressed by your website and will never come back. Your loyal readers? The website will test their patience until finally, they decide never to come back.
The Result: Loss of thousands of viewers.
The Solution: Smaller Image Size
One of the things that we always try to do is add an image to our post. Adding images to a post is just like adding spices to your food. You are making your post tastier and attractive to your viewers. Yet, the biggest downside to adding these is that it results in a massive increase in page loading time.
Each photo you upload from your camera can be up to 10MB. Imagine a person with a typical internet speed – it would take him up to a minute to load this webpage. By the time this happens, your website is already out of the game. If you want to see how image size can affect your browsing experience – take a look at this website.
It is more beneficial if you use images from copyrights free images sites. Get more details from one of the best collection of best 30 copyrights free images sites.
So how can we reduce the size of our pictures substantially without losing quality?
You can use freebies like FILEminimizer Pictures (Windows) or ImageOptim (Mac) to reduce your pictures’ size by 99%! That can dramatically reduce the loading time of your site.
Using CDN Services
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) can also make your site insanely fast and increase your search engine ranking. As a bonus, it also saves your bandwidth costs from your hosting provider.
So how does a CDN work? A CDN basically makes copies of your files and stores them in different servers around the world. So when a user asks for a file, numerous different servers can work up at the same time to give these files to all the different users around the world, therefore reducing the loading time and speeding up your site.
The Best CDN to use? WordPress users have a unanimous view when it comes to the best CDN on the market: CloudFare. It’s been in the market for 15 years and reduces your website bandwidth by up to 60%. That itself gives a massive boost to your website development. Best of all, basic accounts are free!
In Summary
Let’s recap what we’ve learned. Slow websites are bad for visitors, and these can be sped up by reducing the size of the site’s images and using CDN services. Voilà!
Enjoy and until the next article, happy blogging!
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