If you have a slow / slowly loading website, it is best to optimize it as quickly as possible, because research has also shown that 46% of people do not return to a poorly performing website / webshop. Also, it has been researched what approximately the maximum time is before 1 in 4 visitors leave the website / webshop, and that is after 3 seconds of waiting.

Another study has shown that well-performing websites / webshops have higher conversions and better sales, as 88% of internet users prefer to choose a high-performing website with high scores on speed and user-friendliness. In addition, 50% of internet users indicated they would leave the website / webshop after just 3 seconds.

Search engines and speed

Everyone hates waiting, including search engine robots. When a website / webshop loads so slowly and takes a huge amount of time to load, it can even happen that the search engine does not index your website / webshop, because it gets a "Website can't be reached" response back from the server. This means that the search engine thinks the website does not exist.
Therefore, it is very important to have a fast-loading website / webshop, but also because search engines give you a higher ranking and your website / webshop a higher score. Search engines have been very focused on user-friendliness, readability, website responsiveness, and speed in recent years.

How can I get a faster website / webshop?

There are many ways to get a faster website / webshop. The most important thing is that the website builder takes this into account right from the start of building your website / webshop. Although this is still not always the case with all website developers, it is also possible to optimize after your website is already online.

There are various points that your web builder and webshop developer can take into account, but which can also be solved after your website is put online, namely:

• Resize photos, logos, and other images and save them in modern formats
  Save photos, logos, and other images in both JPG or PNG format, but for modern browsers, you can also use the WEBP format. For simple shapes and many logos, even an SVG can be created that can be used in any size because these are vectors.
• Minimize the use of plugins and widgets
  Use as few plugins and widgets as possible, especially those that are loaded from external websites. Then also make a proper consideration whether it is necessary to add the functionalities to your website / webshop or not. This applies not only to plugins and widgets but also to, for example, fonts and icons that are loaded from external websites. The more connections that are made during the loading of your website, the longer the website / webshop takes to load.
• Reduce the size of style files and possibly JavaScript files
  Every website nowadays uses a style file and JavaScript files to make your website look nice and interactive, but all these files are extra files that also need to be loaded when loading your website. By reducing and minimizing the style files and JavaScript files, they are optimized for faster loading times of your website / webshop.
• Optimize your HTML, PHP, and JavaScript
  By optimizing your HTML, PHP, and JavaScript codes to make them as fast as possible, you also improve the speed of your website / webshop. For example, a slow-loading PHP loop that retrieves data from a database with 10 million lines will load much slower than a database table with only 10 lines. Also, JavaScript errors and messages in the developer tools of Google Chrome will cause the website / webshop to become slower.
• Enable web cache for your website
  It is possible via your server or via an HTAccess file to ensure that your files are stored in the browser of your visitors. This is called web cache, and it ensures that files do not have to be downloaded again from your server every time. This is also done when watching videos online, but they call it streaming because you can watch while the video is being saved and the video is deleted after streaming.
• Fast web hosting
  Slow web hosting can also cause your website not to load quickly. You can optimize your website / webshop as much as you want, but it will not be able to perform at its best because the web hosting is too slow.
  If you are looking for good, reliable, and fast web hosting, we can help you further. Contact us for more information or check the web hosting page of our website.

Hopefully, you have learned something from this item about how you can ensure that visitors find your website / webshop better and how to optimize your website / webshop to achieve faster loading times. If you want more information or need help with this, you can always contact us.