When your social media posts direct your followers to your webpage, loading speed is essential to keeping them on the page. Loading speed matters because as websites are becoming bigger and more sophisticated, they need more attention to provide a quality customer experience. When not carefully tended to, they slow down and drive users away.

Not only does a page’s load speed influence your SEO rankings, but more importantly, if the page does not load in 3 seconds or less, it will be ditched in favor of one that will. Here are three tricks to speed up your webpage’s load speed:

1. Upgrade Your Hosting
If your webpage executes a lot of code and accesses multiple data bases all at once, yet runs slowly, you should look into upgrading to a more sophisticated hosting company. It is important when choosing a hosting company to pick one with a server located near your target audience because it cuts down on the distance the data has to travel.

2. Use Browser Caching
Browser caching lets you temporarily store some data on page visitors’ computers, so they do not have to wait for everything on the site to load every time they visit a page on your website. This does not directly make the page load faster, but it minimizes the amount of things that have to load (like your logo), thus expediting the process.

3. Optimize and Compress Your Images
Images take the most time to load on a webpage, so it is important to scale them to a manageable size without sacrificing quality. If your website uses WordPress, you can compress images with plugins like WP Smush. Compressing images reduces their side by up to 80%, exponentially increasing your page’s speed.

Sourcing via Social Media Today.