Web page speed and performance are crucial to the user experience, and few users have higher expectations than those living in the UK.
If your site is too slow, you will lose visitors and all visitors are potential customers.
Apart from frustrated users, lower conversion rates, and higher bounce rates, search engines factor a website’s speed into rankings.
When optimizing your website, remember that every millisecond counts and you must consider everything.
The UK has one of the most lucrative e-commerce markets, and it is set to grow even more. According to Statista, by 2024, the UK had around 50 million e-commerce users.
With those statistics, no UK online retailer can afford their website to slow down sales. Follow these five tips below to optimise your website:
- Image Conscious
One of the biggest culprits for increasing load speeds is an image file size that exceeds the recommended sizing.
Reducing image file sizes can significantly improve your website loading times. Use tools like TinyPNG to reduce image file sizes without sacrificing.
Always use the right file format and ensure all images are correctly sized for your website layout.
- Content Delivery Network
Latency used to be one of the biggest killers of website performance, SEO, and success, but that is where a hero came in to save the day – a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
While not mission-critical to a website, CDNs allow users from across the globe to access your website at the same speed as local users.
For example, without a CDN your UK website will be easily accessible to local users, but someone trying to access it from Italy would struggle with increased data transfer times.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO services are essential for optimising your website and ensuring it can be found, navigated, and understood by search engines and customers alike.
Getting it right is one of the most crucial aspects of your digital presence in the UK.
Choose local SEO experts who can provide a clear game plan for monitoring, assessing, and improving technical SEO aspects of your website.
The results will help to boost organic traffic, enhance load times, and provide a much-needed boost to conversion rates.
- Use Caching Systems
There are several key benefits of caching your UK website.
Caching reduces network traffic, improves load times, and reduces server requests, which means lower bandwidth costs – something that is especially beneficial for high-traffic sites.
Cached content can still be accessible even if the origin server is temporarily down, ensuring users can access your website during downtime.
- Limit Using Images To Display Text
Using text in an image is not recommended because it is completely useless for SEO and increases the load times of your web pages – more images mean a heavier web page.
Text embedded in images is not readable by screen readers so by doing that, your brand is isolating people with visual impairments. That is a mandated regulation for public sector bodies that came into force in September 2018.
Some UK brands continue to do this on their website because they want to use custom fonts, but there are better ways to achieve that.
To End
If you are a UK website owner and want your marketing pounds to stretch further, prioritize the above five tips – you will not be disappointed!