It’s risky to go on the assumption that your website’s page-loading speed is perfectly adequate. An academy’s or a coach’s website needs to be as delay-free as possible, and there are quick, no-cost ways to check on this.
A listing and description of website speed-test and performance-test tools is available by clicking on this link. The source is Guru99, a leading web performance company.
Optimizing your loading times becomes even more critical as your site grows in popularity, and shaving off a few half-seconds can make a big difference down the line. The golden page-load speed for most sites is around three seconds. According to a consumer survey, every additional second a page takes to load can cause a reduction in sales conversions of up to 7 percent. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to improve site speed, including a group of especially effective ones that we’re sharing here. Implementing even a few of them should help your coaching website load faster.
Choose the Right Hosting Provider: Every web hosting provider will tell you that it’s the fastest, so it’s your job to compare features and prices and to read as many reviews as possible before you make a decision. You can always change web hosting providers down the line, but that tends to be a hassle. If you choose the right service and hosting plan, your website should be blazing fast from the start.
Leverage Browser Caching: Caching is one of the most critical steps to improving your site’s loading times. By enabling browser caching, you tell your visitors’ browsers to store some (or all) of your site’s static files on their computers temporarily. Since those visitors won’t need to reload your site fully every time they return, loading times should be much faster on subsequent visits. There are plenty of ways to leverage browser caching, so if you haven’t set it up yet, do so first chance you get.
Enable “Keep-Alive” On Your Web Server: Usually when you visit a website, your browser establishes a connection to its server and uses that to transfer the files it needs to fetch. However, if your server isn’t properly configured, users might need to establish new connections for every single file they want to transfer. Naturally, that’s not an efficient way to load modern websites with dozens and sometimes hundreds of files. To avoid that situation, you want to configure your web server to use what’s called a “keep-alive” HTTP header or persistent connection.
Enable GZIP Compression: As its name implies, GZIP is a compression method that lets you reduce the file sizes for several elements within your website. In some cases, simply enabling GZIP compression can reduce the “weight” of your pages by up to 70 percent. The smaller a page is, the faster it will generally load. Many web hosts enable GZIP compression for almost all plans out of the box.
Avoid Landing Page Redirects: The conventional wisdom for years encouraged setting up a mobile-friendly version of your website, both for Search Engine Optimization purposes and to keep users happy. For that approach to work, you had to implement landing page redirects that sent mobile users toward the “appropriate” version of your site and make them cacheable to speed things up further. But as mobile devices have overtaken desktop browsers when it comes to overall traffic, the idea of designing multiple versions of your website no longer makes much sense. Instead, you want a single, mobile-friendly design that scales across all possible resolutions. It’s best to avoid redirects whenever possible. Each redirect is another hoop users have to jump through, and by reducing them, you can improve your site’s loading times.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): With most types of hosting (except cloud hosting), your website resides in a single server with a specific location. Every visitor needs to connect to that server in order to load your website, which can lead to bottlenecks. CDNs are clusters of servers around the world that store copies of websites. That means, for example, your site can be hosted in the US but use a CDN with servers in Latin America, Europe, and the rest of the world. If someone from Brazil tries to visit your site, that CDN will serve your site from its Latin American servers. That translates to lower loading times for international visitors, which becomes more important the more remote virtual teaching you do.
Optimize Your Website’s Images: Images are vital to the performance of a coach’s website and the development of that coach’s brand. However, high-quality image files put a burden on the site—large file sizes will mean longer loading times. There are two main ways to correct that issue, compressing images before you upload them to your site and resizing images to adjust to modern screen resolutions. There are lots of tools you can use to compress images with minimal or no loss in quality. If you’re using WordPress, you have access to plugins that can automate the entire process, and help you resize images while you’re at it. There’s no reason to serve images with massive resolutions if your visitors are mostly accessing your site from laptops or mobile devices. By combining compression with resizing, you can reduce image file sizes drastically and speed up your website simultaneously.
Fix Broken URLs: Having too many broken URLs on your site can waste its “crawl budget,” preventing search engine bots from indexing other critical pages and costing you visitors in the long run. Moreover, broken URLs give users the impression that your website isn’t properly maintained. This can drive visitors away, increasing your site’s bounce rate as much as slow loading of pages would. You should crawl your website periodically to make sure all of its URLs are working. You can easily do that using tools such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider or Google Search Console. If you find broken URLs on your site, you can fix them manually or use a plugin. You may also want to ensure that your site doesn’t have a misconfigured .htaccess file, which can sometimes cause broken links.