If you run a high-traffic website that receives thousands of unique visitors, your primary goal is to make sure that your website’s infrastructure can support all that traffic effortlessly. You also need to understand that running a high-traffic website means having a website running numerous simultaneous requests from users from all over, all expecting lightning-fast load times. Slow-loading websites and delays will cost you those visitors, as well as revenue and your reputation.
To keep your site visitors from your competition and on your divorce mediation services page, here are some of the things you should do:
Understand the expectations of your visitors
No one has a whole minute to wait for your web pages to load. Google frowns upon websites with slow-loading pages.
Doubtful? Well, did you know that as many as 57% of site users will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and that 47% of users want web pages to load in under 2 seconds? There’s also the fact that a one-second delay could cost you 7% of conversions and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction, not to mention the fact that the sites with slow-loading web pages in high-traffic times lose as many as 75% of their customers.
So, if you have an e-commerce store, a website, or a blog, you have everything laid out for you. If you wish to sell more in November during Black Friday, start working on your website today.
How do you set in motion the wheels for your website’s success?
Find a new web host
Put web hosting service provider determines how fast your web pages’ load when you have a spike in traffic and the resources allocated by the web host determine whether your website crashes or not. If you’ve been on a shared hosting plan, now is the time to upgrade to VPS or dedicated server hosting.
You could also opt to find a new web hosting service provider. If this is your preferred path for your website, don’t go for anyone with an uptime rate below 99.99%. Also, you should have more access to and control of resources.
Streamlining your web design
For proper display, all the elements of your web pages must have an HTTP request between the hosting server and the visitor’s web browser. If your pages have too many scripts to run, everything will slow down. Deal with this by cleaning the scripts to avoid unnecessary characters through minification.
Make use of an image optimizer or any other plugin to upload media, set a specific image dimension for image display, combine CSS files into one file, and upload all images at their intended display size, don’t resize large images. You could also use the lazy loading app to load media at once and on-demand.
You should also reduce the number of plugins you use, avoid redirects, and fix any broken/ dead links.
Use CDN
A CDN or content delivery network refers to a collection of servers spread worldwide to optimize your content delivery to your local visitors. CDNs work by caching static files across several servers, and it delivers all those files from the server location closest to the visitor. This makes for fast loading pages.
Other tips:
- Caching
- Use zipped files
- Enhance your site’s security
