3 Free-or-Cheap Ways to Speed Up Your Business’ Website
Struggling with a slow website? Contrary to what you may think, you may not need to hire a web design agency to speed up your existing site, or get them to build you a new one.
Before you spend a lot of money on a major project like that, you should see what a few cheap or free fixes could do to boost your site’s speed or performance.
So, before you spend big-time money, try some of these small (but effective) speed optimization tactics.
1. Upgrade Your Web Hosting
When you’re trying to find a domain for your website you don’t want to go with the cheapest host you can find. If you spend more on a latte than you did on your hosting company, you can’t expect good performance or uptime on your site.
In fact, cheap web hosting companies have limited resources and bandwidth, so they will throttle your speeds if you start to earn too much traffic and use up too much of their resources.
Pay a little bit more to get a lot more value, speed and reliability
2. Prune Your Content
How often should you do this? That all depends on how often you’re adding new content to your website.
If you’re regularly publishing blogs and podcasts, you should audit and prune your content several times a year. The same can be said if you introduce a new product/ service line and add several product pages.
However, if you’re only publishing a few blogs a month and not adding a lot of landing pages, you can likely get away with a yearly content audit/ pruning.
This can significantly improve your site’s performance almost immediately, as you remove any unneeded pages/ blogs that could be weighing your site down, while ensuring all of your images are properly compressed for web use.
3. Test More and Test Smarter
A lot of businesses will test their home page once a year, get a decent number and then move on for the rest of the year assuming that they don’t have a speed problem. This is fundamentally flawed for two main reasons.
First of all, these speed tests will test the exact URL you give them, not the entire site. You may literally only be testing your home page. The rest of your site (i.e. your business-driving product pages) may be unknowingly much slower.
Second of all, a good site load time expires the second you add literally anything else to your site. The more content your site has, the heavier the back-end gets and the more your speeds are likely to suffer. So, a good site load speed at the start of the year does not mean your speeds are fine for the next 12 months.
Test your speeds site-wide, and test them often.
These are only a few of the things you can do to boost your site’s speed. Generally speaking, the older a site is, the more likely it is that you may need to update or rebuild it. However, you would be amazed by the difference that the 3 tactics above can make.
All 3 could boost your site’s speeds, almost instantly!