How Digital Agencies Are Scaling Projects Without Compromising Speed or Security

One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is page load time. Slow page loading time negatively impacts user experience, increasing bounce rates and reducing engagement. It can also lower your chances of getting ranked higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Online businesses, especially digital agencies, are prioritizing website page load speed.

Here’s a closer look at four ways businesses are scaling their websites to rank high and improve user engagement.

1. Evaluate Your Webpage’s Speed

Digital companies start by analyzing the current web page speed of their business sites. They use numerous tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPage Test, and Chrome DevTools.

According to Google, more than 53% of visitors abandon a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google has also made page load time a ranking factor, which means that as more and more users abandon your site out of frustration, your chances of ranking higher drop.

2. Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider

Starting out with a shared hosting package is quite common. However, as businesses expand, the standard hosting package fails to provide adequate support and the right resources to cater to growing needs. Growing businesses are recommended to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

With a VPS server, you have dedicated storage and bandwidth, which means your site can load much faster and handle more traffic. A VPS server is especially useful for digital agencies that experience moderate to high traffic and run complex scripts.

Taking services from a reliable hosting provider, such as Liquid Web, can lay the foundation for a faster website.

3. Minimize HTTP Requests

Another common way to boost website speed is to minimize HTTP requests. Whenever a user visits your site, the browser sends numerous HTTP requests to load images, fonts, and scripts. Here are some ways you can minimize HTTP requests:

• Combine CSS and JavaScript files, reducing additional characters.
• Remove unnecessary characters and white space from HTML files.
• Use browser caching to ensure faster access to your site.
• Remove third-party plugins or fonts as they might slow down the browser.

Fewer HTTP requests mean faster loading times without compromising security or safety.

4. Optimize Images

Images are larger in size than HTML and CSS files, which means they take the longest to load on a website. This is especially true for mobile phones or slow internet connections. Optimizing images is one of the easiest ways to improve your website’s performance. Here are some tips you can follow:

• Always resize images to the exact dimensions needed for your site.
• Compress the images. Use built-in CMS plugins to reduce image size without compromising on the quality.
• Use modern image formats, such as WebP or JPEG.

Experts also recommend using lazy loading, which loads images and other assets only when they become visible to the user. This can reduce initial loading time. Optimizing images will enhance your SEO efforts, helping you contribute to a user-friendly site experience.