In today’s digital-savvy world, you need to ensure that your website is always running as quickly as possible. Not only is speed a convenient feature when you’re designing and editing your website, but it’s important for delivering the best possible service to your readers and potential customers. In fact, 40% of people say that they’d abandon a website that takes too long to load, so it’s essential that you keep your site lightning-fast at all times. Below, we’ve put together five ways to speed up your website.

1. Use a content delivery network

Content delivery networks, often known as CDNs, cache your website and deliver it across hundreds of different servers depending on where it is being accessed from. One of the most popular content delivery networks is CloudFlare, but many web hosts and server providers now include their own forms of content delivery as part of their service.

2. Switch to a better web host

If your site is running slow, then the chances are that you’re on a server that just isn’t fit for your needs. This could be because the server is old, or even that it’s operating from a different country, so find a UK-based web host such as PAC Web Hosting to host your website. What’s more, PAC offers free SSL certificates, which are known to improve the performance and security of your website, and they use LiteSpeed web servers to deliver your content as quickly as possible to your end users.

3. Cache your content

WordPress plugins such as W3 Total Cache can be used to help speed up your website – simply download the plugin from the internet and set it up on your server. Such plugins reduce the download times of your content, which not only helps to reduce the amount of bandwidth your website uses but helps regarding search engine optimisation and can deliver a ten times improvement in site performance on Google’s Page Speed Insights.

4. Cut down on images

Although images are important in modern web design, too many high retina images can slow down your website and make your content take longer to be delivered. If you do need to use images, then consider using a ‘smushing’ tool – that is, a tool that automatically reduces the size of your image files without cutting the quality of the images.

5. Have a responsive website

Responsive web design is a buzz phrase in the digital marketing industry now, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its uses. Responsive web design allows your website to scale depending on the size of the screen that user access your content from, and means that you won’t need to create several versions of the same website for desktop, mobile and tablet. By using an optimised, responsive theme, you’ll be able to cut down on load times.

We’ve put together just five of the best ways to reduce the amount of time it takes for your website to load, but there are a lot more factors to consider. Start with the basics, and you’ll soon see that your website is faster and offers more value to your reader than ever before.