With website speed, first impressions really do count. A slow website will harm your law firm. The world operates much faster than in the past. This also means that when it comes to your law firm and your website speed, the faster the better. You typically have around 5 seconds to capture the attention of your website visitors, otherwise you run the risk of them leaving and visiting a competitor’s site instead.

Delivering a fast website experience allows you to build trust with your visitors, keeps them engaged with your content, and helps them understand what you do. Here are 10 ways to improve your website load speed.

With the ever shortening attention span of the mass population, you need to make sure that you have their attention and you can keep it. Here are 10 tips that will improve your website speed.

1. Get a better web hosting company

Slower website speed happens when the servers are overloaded. If you are experiencing issues with speed and you feel like your host may be the culprit, you might want to consider breaking up. When it comes to web hosting, a one-size fits all approach may not be in your best interest.

Advanced servers that are built to serve the masses can be more pricey, but they have faster loading website speeds. The amount of time your customer is waiting for your site to load, can cost you in the long run. Check out this Web Design company with an advanced server. They can speed up your website overnight!

2. Make your website smaller

Bigger isn’t always better especially when inviting visitors over to your website. Large files within the coding may slow down your speed and take longer to load. Making sure to follow basic rules can help maximize your speed on a large website. Such as:

  • Using images sparingly, instead of overloading your website with graphics
  • Compress your files
  • Utilizing Minimal fonts
  • Use proper coding and keep it simple

3. Minimize external requests

By minimizing external requests for content you’re helping to boost your website speed. Instead of having external links, optimizing embedded links to social media can be helpful.

Since these tend to load after the main pages, it can drag down your speed.

4. Don’t use a WordPress theme

WordPress themes have a tendency to come with preloaded codebases that overload your website and make it run at a snail’s pace. One alternative to purchasing a WordPress theme is by having a web developer create a customized website just for you.

If you are still wanting a diy option, try researching some lesser known sites that have a more sleek codebase. Cleaning up your website’s backend will be worth it in the long run.

5. Lower the number of redirects you are using on your site

Every time your URL is redirected and bounces back and forth trying to find the server, it creates a situation to lose website speed. Utilizing accurate URL in your script can help.

If you create a direct path for your scripts and files, then unnecessary redirects will be obsolete and your visitors will see what they need faster.

6. Remove unnecessary plugins

In the event that you decide to add plugins to your theme, double checking that you are only installing what you need will help to make the website speeds more optimal. There’s no need for any extras in this department. It only takes up additional space and doesn’t serve your website.

Some themes come with built-in plugins and while they can help in easier setup of your site, they can drag you down in speed if it’s options that you aren’t using. For example, if you have a physical product and buy a template that has an e-commerce plugin already added, you may not be ready to utilize it at the moment.

7. Compress images

Less is more when it comes to compressing your images. Using tools and software to help create smaller images can help with load times while still maintaining high quality.

You can save a substantial amount of data by implementing tools such as TinyPNG to assist with the compression.

8. Lazy load images

It’s well known that our society is leaning more towards visuals to get our attention. Adding interesting and supportive graphics and images can aid in attracting visitors to you site. Since these images can pull a lot of weight from the speed needed to load successfully, sometimes the images are slow to load.

There’s not much worse than trying to view a page and see the dreaded loading circle spinning and spinning. We as a society are not typically patient people.

9. Scale your images

Adding images to your site can be more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but the proper sizing of the image is important as well. Changing the scale of your images can boost speed time and help create a visual experience for your visitors.

The larger the image, the more data it takes to download. Making sure you load the proper size image is beneficial to your website speed.

10. HTTP Caching

Navigating the internet with code can be made more difficult since the network and server need to tag team to fetch the website. The traveling of information multiple times can slow down your need for speed.

Ensuring that the correct HTTP cache is valuable. Performance is boosted by the reusing of information stored in the browser’s cache.

There are numerous ways that you may be losing precious time due to poor practices on the backend of your website design and development. Not all is lost, by implementing a few changes you can gain website speed. This will ensure that you’re not losing visitors and they aren’t losing patience from long wait times.

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