How to Speed Up a Website: Improve Your Loading Speeds With These 9 Tips

Most folks expect near-instant access to your website — so much so that they become 32% more likely to leave your site after viewing a single page when loading time increases from one to three seconds. I’ve personally left sites because they were slow to load, especially when surfing on my phone, which is notable since 61.5% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Keeping your site speed — the number of seconds your site takes to load — under three seconds is therefore essential to turning first-time visitors into long-term audience members.

I’ve spent over a decade building websites and learned many ways to keep a site within the three-second guideline. I’ve used several strategies, ranging from beginner-friendly methods like decluttering your site to more complex strategies like code minification. Whether your website is loading slowly or you just want the best possible performance, here’s how to test site speeds and optimize your website loading time.

Test your website speeds to determine your site’s current performance

There are many free site speed testing tools. Many experts recommend PageSpeed Insights, which provides data on both mobile and desktop site speeds. PageSpeed Insights also gives you detailed information on improving your site, including SEO and accessibility tips, like adding metadata and making menus easier to navigate. This actionable information makes PageSpeed Insights a great starting place, but it doesn’t let you see region-specific site speed. This can be a major drawback if you want to optimize your site speed for visitors in a specific region.

I recommend WebPageTest for analyzing site speed in a specific area, as it lets you choose the device, region and connection type (such as cable or 4G) you’re testing for. Its granular testing options to gauge website performance are why I use WebPageTest for CNET web hosting reviews. Moreover, you can run up to 300 free tests per month with a WebPageTest account. You’ll also get site-specific suggestions for improving loading times, like adding a CDN or enabling caching for certain areas of your site. However, you won’t get the SEO tips offered by PageSpeed Insights, so you might want to use both tools.

You should run site speed tests regularly

I recommend running speed tests after every major change you make during your initial optimization process. You can use those regular tests to assess what’s working, what isn’t and how significant any improvements are.

Once you’ve completed site optimization, I suggest testing your site at least once a year and running additional tests after any significant layout changes. Frequent assessments help you ensure that your site is providing a consistent experience for your visitors over time.

There are many ways to speed up your website

If your site takes more than three seconds to load, or you’re just looking to fully optimize your site speed, you can make your website faster using several techniques, including streamlining your site design, uninstalling plugins or themes and enabling caching.

Reduce clutter in your site design

An overabundance of images, animations and other disparate elements can slow your site down. This visual clutter can also make it difficult for visitors to find the information they need or take the action you want them to take, so removing it serves multiple purposes.

There’s no hard and fast rule for the number of images or animations to include, but there are some questions you can ask to assess specific areas of your site for visual clutter:

• Can users easily see the most important information on this page? If this information is hidden under large images or animations, you may have a visual clutter problem. Similarly, if the information is sandwiched between visual elements in a small font, you may want to remove or resize those visual elements to emphasize the text.
• Can users easily see the action you want them to take? Most pages feature a call to action encouraging your visitors to do something like subscribe to your newsletter. This CTA should be prominent, and any surrounding visual elements should enhance its visibility and encourage users to take action. Remove any unrelated images or videos in the same visual area (where they can be seen without scrolling away) as the CTA.
• Are the visuals on this page relevant to its purpose? Every image, video or animation should have a direct thematic connection to the page it’s on, especially if you’re building a professional or business website. Remove visual elements that don’t meet this criteria to improve site speed, branding and overall user experience.

Personally, I like to stick with one large image in each area of the screen, accompanied by no more than one header and two to three text boxes. I also take great care to make sure every section — the new areas folks see each time they scroll — has a specific goal and that all of the content in each section aligns with its goal.

Not sure about specific elements of your site? Consider asking a friend or trusted colleague to look at those elements — or your entire site — and tell you if they can immediately identify the content’s goal.

Get rid of unnecessary themes, plugins and extensions

Removing different elements can thin your website’s bloat. Themes, plugins and extensions typically stay installed after you deactivate them in content management systems like WordPress. So they may still be using essential site resources even though they’re inactive. They can also create security issues, as these plugins won’t receive security patches.

Make sure you fully uninstall plugins, themes and extensions when you stop using them. If you’ve deactivated plugins or themes before, confirm that they’re fully uninstalled. Deleting unused themes, extensions and plugins will improve site speed on both the front end (the area your visitors see) and the back end (your admin area).

I also like to audit my plugins every six months, going through the full list and asking myself how I’m using each plugin. If I can’t state how a plugin has benefited my website in the last six months, I get rid of it.

Optimize your images

Images are often the largest, and therefore slowest to load, elements of a website. Thankfully, there are several ways you can optimize your images to improve site speed:

• Use images of a reasonable size. Programs like Canva simplify this with templates sized for specific areas of a website. You may need to manually resize other photos, such as screenshots. I personally reduce my screenshots to a width of 1600 pixels, keeping the aspect ratio intact to avoid distorting the images.
• Use an image compressor. You can compress PNG or JPG emails for free without losing image quality with a tool like TinyPNG.
• Use the right file format. JPGs are smaller than PNGs, but their image quality is lower, so you should only use the JPG format for simple images. Complex images should be compressed PNGs or, if you want to fully minimize file size, WebP files.
• Use an image optimization plugin. WordPress users can install a free plugin like Imagify to automatically optimize images. Imagify can also retroactively optimize pictures already on your site.

Many website builders, like Wix, automate image optimization by default, so you can skip image compression if you’re using these tools. However, you’ll still want to make sure your images are reasonably sized and use optimized file formats.

Enable caching

Caching speeds up websites by storing data in specialized layers called caches, which are connected to the server’s CPU instead of the RAM typically used for site storage. The CPU runs faster than the RAM, allowing the server to send cached data more quickly. Some methods of caching also store static data — information that doesn’t change frequently, like the main image on your homepage — in users’ browsers to further improve site speed on repeat visits.

Many web hosting companies, like Hostinger, offer built-in caching. However, you may need to manually enable it. Your host’s knowledge base should contain instructions for enabling caching. I’ve also discussed how to enable caching in several of my reviews, like my SiteGround review, which discusses SiteGround’s Performance Optimizer plugin in detail.

If your host doesn’t offer caching and you’re using WordPress, you can install a caching plugin. WP Fastest Cache is a great free option with multiple caching types and other speed-enhancing tools to help you optimize your site.

Set up lazy load for long pages

Lazy load improves site speed by loading elements as your visitors need them rather than trying to load everything simultaneously. With lazy loading, elements “above the fold” (before your visitors need to scroll) load near-instantly, as the server doesn’t need to use resources to load images or other large files further down. As your visitor scrolls, each area loads with similar speed.

Some website builders, like Wix, use built-in lazy loading protocols to improve site speed. In most cases, however, you’ll need an extension or plugin to enable lazy loading. The good news for WordPress users is that most caching plugins, including WP Fastest Cache, offer lazy loading.

Minify your CSS and JavaScript

Most websites are built on two coding languages, CSS and JavaScript, which together allow sites to do many things, but there are often inefficiencies within them, like extra spaces. Code minification eliminates these extraneous characters and any developer comments left within the code. Code minification also automatically shortens function names. These changes may not drastically reduce loading times, but they can make an impact.

Thankfully, you don’t need to understand code to minify it. Many website builders automatically optimize code for speed. Some, like Shopify, even use their own code languages, which may be faster than CSS and JavaScript. WordPress, meanwhile, requires a plugin to do this — but your free caching plugin probably offers this functionality, so you won’t have to install something new.

Install a content delivery network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) boosts site speed by distributing website data throughout a network of servers in disparate physical locations. Visitors’ devices can then retrieve information from the server closest to them, which is often faster than retrieving data from a server on the other side of the globe.

Your hosting company may offer a built-in CDN on some or all plans; this is especially common for website builders. Alternatively, you can get the Cloudflare CDN and connect it to your website.

Switch to a lightweight theme

While most website builder templates are optimized for speed, this isn’t always true — and it’s not consistently true for WordPress themes, either. Moreover, many templates may only be optimized for desktop, compromising their mobile site speed. If you’re worried this is the cause of your site speed issues, create a blank page and run speed tests on it. If the blank page is slow, there’s a high chance your template is the problem (although it may be a server issue).

Finding a speed-optimal template might be difficult if you’re using a website builder, as there isn’t much site speed data available for templates on sites like Wix or Squarespace. If you’re using WordPress, however, you can find lists of the fastest WordPress templates, complete with data from real speed tests. I’m a big fan of Neve, which is both fast and highly flexible.

Move your site to a new data center

You may be able to improve site speed for an audience in a specific location by switching the data center your site is hosted on. For example, if your primary audience is in Australia, you can switch from a US-based data center to a data center in Sydney. Relying on servers geographically close to your readers allows your visitors’ devices to pull information from a nearby server rather than forcing them to retrieve data from the other side of the world, which can result in reduced loading times. If most of your visitors are based in another country, you can pick a data center in that country instead.

Unfortunately, switching your data center isn’t always possible. Some web hosts don’t let you choose your data center at all, while others only let you select this once during account creation. You also generally can’t do this yourself — you’ll need to ask customer service to make the switch for you.

Consider switching your hosting plan

Your hosting plan may be causing site speed issues if you’re on shared hosting, you’re out of resources like RAM and storage space or your web host is slow. Here’s a deeper explanation of how these problems can impact your site speed:

• You’re using shared hosting: Sites on shared hosting only get a percentage of a server’s processing power, which can make them slower than sites on more advanced hosting types, like VPS hosting, which provide dedicated processing power and bandwidth to each site.
• Your plan doesn’t offer enough resources for current traffic levels: Many shared hosting and even some VPS hosting plans are only designed to handle 10,000 to 50,000 visitors. If you’re getting more visitors than your plan is built for — information usually found on the pricing page or by asking customer service — your site will slow down.
• Your host doesn’t provide good server speeds: Some companies don’t maintain their servers well enough to give a good site speed baseline. Tools like caching and CDNs can improve this baseline, but there’s only so much they can help if the server itself is too slow.

There are two ways to determine if your hosting plan is causing site speed issues. First, check your traffic levels against your allotted bandwidth. If your plan says “unlimited” or “unmetered,” you might not be charged more for higher traffic, but there’s still a limit of how much traffic your site can comfortably handle; contact customer support to get this number. You may need to switch plans to boost site speed if your monthly visits regularly exceed that number.

If you haven’t exceeded your allocated bandwidth and you’re still concerned your host might be the issue, read expert reviews of the service you’re using. These reviews often contain speed test data, which can tell you if the host generally has slow servers. The only host we’ve tested with highly problematic site speed is InMotion Hosting, but there’s a lot of variation, with Hostinger and Shopify providing the best site speeds.

Switching hosts can be frustrating, especially if you’re only partially through a long contract, but it is doable. Many hosts offer free site migration for cPanel-based websites — I’ve had three successful site transfers performed by my current host, HostPapa, requiring nothing more than an email to support — and there are extensive guides on how to transfer web hosting yourself. However, you may need to hire a developer to help you move your site if you’re using a proprietary website builder.

You’ve got options when figuring out how to speed up your website

If you want to hold modern internet users’ attention, you need to make sure your site is as fast as possible. Thankfully, there are many ways you can improve site speed, and many — like reducing design clutter and optimizing images — don’t require code or significant technical skill. I recommend implementing all of these strategies before you consider doing anything drastic.

If the simpler strategies don’t work, consider asking your host to move your site to a new data center, upgrading your hosting plan or switching to a new host altogether. However, these strategies often take longer and may require more cost or technical expertise, so I recommend only using them as a last resort.