Most people living in the West take fast internet connection speeds for granted. Not many people give a second thought to how fast web pages load when they are browsing online. It is, perhaps, only when they travel abroad that they realize not everyone has the luxury of lightning-fast load times. And, it is even later they realize that a substantial number of their clients and consumers can actually come from such countries with slow internet speeds.
If you want your business to be truly global and you also wish to tap into a market that spans the whole world, you will need to take these people into consideration and help them access your website. The best way to do that would be to make your website load in the shortest amount of time. The less time your pages take to load:
- The higher the chances your visitors will want to stay on your pages (and potentially make a purchase)
- The less they have to pay for internet usage – in some countries, prices can be quite stiff
- The lower the chance of the connection being dropped due to timeouts caused by the time required for your website to resolve
The bottom line here, as you can probably see, is that making it easy for people with slow internet connections to access your website will be to your advantage.
So, let’s get on to it.
Reduce images and media files
It is true that images and media make for an interesting website. They attract attention and provide more information that is much easier to consume.
But, what good will it do if your visitors don’t stay long enough to go through with purchases?
Go through your website and find bulky images that you can do without. If you can explain everything they represent in written text, do so. If you think you have to absolutely use them then look for online compression tools and use them to cut image sizes.
At the very least, link to videos and images that are hosted somewhere else and let the visitors decide if they want to go and view them.
Minimize server request times
Every single time your website is accessed by a visitor, a server request is sent out to the machine your site sits on. Your website will then start searching for all the components it is made of including the code, design files, and the databases where all other configurations are stored. All this data needs to be collected before the web page resolves and is presented to your visitors.
Although the time required here is quite low, you can appreciate that as your website’s footfall increases, every single visitor will need to be served this way. The load time will increase proportionally.
The best way to handle this problem is to combine the requests and serve them more quickly. Learn how to use tools like Pingdom to figure out which files need to be fixed and proceed with creating combined configuration files.
Cut the code and streamline processes
A lot of coding goes behind every single web page, and when it has many features or performs multiple complicated processes, it will eventually bloat up.
To keep web page sizes to a minimum, you will need to remove features that aren’t necessary. Don’t create a flashy website that is too slow to load when you can use a plain website that performs well. You can assign each feature its own page so your visitors will click on a link to view it if they choose to do so.
Alternatively, you can also take a look at your processes themselves and cut out the redundant ones and tweak the ones that aren’t performing well.
Scale up
If you notice your website’s visitor numbers have increased substantially, it won’t be fair to hold on to your old hosting package.
Look at the hosting packages that your web hosting provider offers and find the one that has more hard disk space and bandwidth allocations. If your provider offers a scalable solution, you can even ask them to add these resources on your current plan and simply charge you extra for it.
Get a better web hosting provider
If you have done everything above and you still have a slow-loading website, you probably need to take a closer look at your web hosting provider. If they have a server or bandwidth allocation that is too slow, nothing you do will be able to resolve the problem.
Your only choice would be to do some research and switch to the best web hosting provider that meets your requirements.
Bottom line
If you take these points to heart, you will have a global customer base that will be grateful for your efforts and will potentially return to your website over and over again. If you don’t, you will only be doing harm to your business.
