This article is from EJ Insider member Joseph Ho.
We all know that website speed is important, not just to us as site owners, but to all Internet users.
Faster loading sites create happy users. Faster loading sites also create higher click-through rates for Amazon niche sites and better conversion rates for Ecommerce sites. Not only that, website speed is also part of the all-important Google Algorithm, which determines your ranking in their search engine.
Today I am going to reveal to you five techniques that will improve your site loading speed.
1) Web Hosting
Choosing your web hosting company for your niche site is one of the most important things to consider before you even start.
Why? A lot of shared web hosting plans usually host more than athousand websites on a single server, which slows down the shared server and thus the loading speed of all the websites hosted on it.
Most people will ask you to use hosting companies like Hostgator and Bluehost, but do you know that both companies belong to the same group EIG?
Check out this article to read more about it: Endurance International Group brands Bluehost, HostMonster, HostGator, and JustHost are ending 2013 with a massive outage affecting customers worldwide.
Since EIG is a public company with a huge debt, they will of course put as many websites on a single server as possible in order to lower the cost. This is good for them but is bad for niche site creators.
So how do you choose your web hosting company if speed is important? If your site is using WordPress, try using a WordPress hosting company like Traffic Planet Hosting, WP Engine or Synthesis (FYI – Entrepreneurs-Journey.com is on Synthesis).
I recently moved my website from Hostgator to Traffic Planet Hosting. The page loading time improved by 30% without doing any optimization beyond just moving the site.
2) Location Of The Web Hosting Server
Location of your web hosting server is also another important factor to consider.
For example if your niche site is targeting a US audience, you need to get a web hosting server for that country. This is because when the US user enters your website, it loads faster if your web host server is in the US rather than say Singapore.
The distance counts when you are dealing with website speed. Let me show you an example…
I live in Singapore and for this test accessed my website joseph-ho.com. The time taken to reach the US server is 248 milliseconds. But if I am accessing a local site like ieatandeat.com, the time taken to reach the Singapore server is 3 milliseconds. See the difference? It all depends on where your audience is.
3) Website Theme
A good website theme for your niche site is the second most important thing to consider when it comes to page loading times.
Website themes with clean code load quickly. I recommend themes that run on the Genesis and Thesis platforms – these are my two top picks. Not only are their themes faster, they are also able to boost your search engine optimization with their inbuilt functions.
4) WordPress Plugins
One of the MUST install WordPress plugins is W3 total cache. (To find out how to configure it properly, check out my guide here.)
If you have a lot of images on your niche site, another good plugin is WP Smush.it. This plugin will help you to reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress.
5) Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user.
For example, if a user enters your niche site from Europe and your niche site is hosted in the US, the CDN service provider will route the user to their Europe server instead of your web hosting. This speeds up the loading response by redirecting them to the nearest server.
Another good reason to use a CDN is you are able to offload your web hosting server bandwidth by redirecting your server to other servers.
In tests from my authority site experiment, by using theMaxCDN service, I’ve seen great initial results: my site with over 350 blog posts now loads in 2 seconds! Previously it took 15 to 20 seconds.
This boosted my Adsense average earning from $3 to $6 per day. Because of the website speed it boosted the CTR by around 40% as well! Not only that, my email opt in list increased by 20%!
As you can see there are many benefits that come from taking a few steps to improve the load time of your blog or niche website.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment.
Joseph Ho
