The color of your CTA button or the font of your headline doesn’t have as much to do with your conversion rate as delivering a lightning-fast user experience.
When a web page loads slowly, it’s a critical problem for any business.
Whether it’s search engine bots or human users — everyone loves a fast-loading website!
Your SaaS website load time has a direct correlation with your conversion rate. In fact, nothing deters people more than a slow-loading website. You can measure website load speed using tools like Google Pagespeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTMetrix.
Once you understand where your SaaS website stands, there are several ways you can optimize your page load speed. In this blog, we’ll discuss the four best techniques you can employ to improve your website loading speed.
Let’s get started!
Boost your SaaS Website Speed And Increase Your Revenue
-
Optimize and load your images correctly
Including eye-catching images to break up the text within web pages is critical. When it comes to B2B eCommerce websites, images are a crucial part of their business.
While there are a lot of positives to including images, they can have a negative impact on your website loading time and SEO if you don’t optimize them.
The images you create using Photoshop and Illustrator are amazing but large.
By optimizing these large images, you’re basically removing unnecessary data included within your image to reduce its size based on where you plan to display it on your site.
The primary goal of optimizing images is to strike the right balance between acceptable quality and the smallest file size.
How can you optimize your images to improve your website loading speed?
-
Choose the right file format. There are two common file types — PNG and JPEG. PNG is for high-quality pictures, though the size of the images is also pretty huge. JPEG is the most advisable type since you can adjust the level of quality to reduce the file size. Experts suggest that you should opt for JPEG or JPG format when there are a lot of colors in the image and PNG for simple images.
-
Compression Quality vs. Size. It’s a good practice to keep the total weight of a single web page under 1 or 2 MB. You can keep your image size down to 100 to 150 KB per image without significantly affecting the quality.
-
Lossy vs. Lossless. These are two types of compression that you can utilize. Lossy compression can reduce the size of the image significantly, but it eliminates quite a bit of data. On the other hand, lossless compression is a filter that compresses this data instead of eliminating it. It doesn’t reduce the quality of the image, but the pictures need to be uncompressed before you can render them.
You can use tools like Adobe Photoshop, Ezgif.com, ImageResize.org, and ImageOptim for compressing your images.
Image Optimization Plugins
When you use CMS platforms like WordPress, you have the advantage of using Image optimization plugins to compress your images automatically as you upload them. These plugins can also help you optimize the images you’ve already shared on your site.
However, if you plan to simply use a plugin without manually resizing them, that may not be the best way to go. If you upload large images to your media library, it will eat up your web host’s disk space very fast.
The best practice is to resize your images using the compression tools we’ve shared above and then upload them to your site and rely on the image optimization plugins to reduce it further.
Imagify Image Optimizer, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, TinyPNG, and WP Smush are plugins that you can check out.
2. Take advantage of caching
When a lot of users access your website at the same time, it will put quite a bit of load on your server. This means your website will load slowly for each user, which is something you need to avoid in any case.
Caching allows your server to store the current version of your site and showcase this version until your website can be updated.
This simple process ensures that your website doesn’t have to render over and over again for each user and reduces the response time significantly.
When a web page is cached, it doesn’t have to send database requests every time the user visits your web page.
How can you cache your website?
Website caching depends on the platform you’ve built your website on.
If you’re using WordPress, you can use plugins like W3 Super Cache, WP Rocket, or W3 Total Cache.
If you’re using a Dedicated or VPS server and have access to the backend, you can set up your website caching from your general settings dashboard. However, setting up caching is challenging if you’re using shared server hosting.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network
When you have a global audience, it is a good idea to use a content delivery network (CDN). CDN is more of an extension of website cache optimization.
What is a CDN, and why should you use it?
CDN is a set of web servers that are distributed across several geographical locations. Therefore, when your users access your site from different parts of the world, the CDN redirects them to connect to the server that’s closest to their geographical location.
CDN is designed to supercharge the performance of your website, specifically when you have a globally dispersed user base.
When you have a single physical server, all the requests from your users are sent to that particular hardware. It’s no surprise that when a single server has to do all the work, the server load time increases significantly since it takes a while to process each request.
Using a CDN helps you deliver content to your users much faster, increasing your business’s bottom line.
4. Plugins — Less is always more!
One of the most common aspects of every website is plugins. While they add a lot of critical (and sometimes fancy) features and functionalities to your site, it comes at a price.
When you install plugins, they have a significant impact on your site’s performance. The more plugins you install on your site, the more resources you need in the backend to run these plugins.
This reduces your website loading speed and poses a threat to the security of your website.
Therefore, before installing any plugin, do a thorough background check to ensure its reliability.
Secondly, even if it passes this background check, think twice about whether you really need the plugin. Only install necessary ones and periodically get rid of plugins you no longer use.
Also, always keep your plugins up to date.
Final Thoughts
People usually let the page speed factor slide because they want their site to be aesthetically pleasing or have crazy animations. However, according to Google, the recommended page load speed is 2 seconds or less.
What do you do with all your creativity and animations if people don’t even wait until your site loads?
Therefore, it’s critical to focus more on how fast you get your website in front of the users than all the bells and whistles you want to add to your site.
We hope that this post provided you with some actionable tips about what you can do to improve your website loading speed.
If you’re looking for some help improving your website speed and your site’s SEO positioning, feel free to book a no-strings-attached discovery call with Teranga today!
Read out our complete SaaS SEO guide here.
