Learn How to Improve Your WIX Website Speed

The page loading speed of your website is one of the most important factors in your business’s success. A slow website can cost you a loss in web traffic, poor website rankings, low conversion rate, dramatic loss in online visibility on search engines and have an overall negative impact on the business’s success. On the contrary, a fast loading website can engage your customers in your website and improve your website rankings, traffic and sales. There are certain elements that affect your website performance which are not in your control on the WIX platform such as CDN’s, https requests, server response time and scripts embedded by default into the CMS back-end systems but there is still plenty that you can do on your WIX website to improve its overall speed performance and make it perform super fast like any other high speed website (using any other platform such as wordpress, weebly, squarespace or hosted on an independent hosting provider) on the internet. In this article we are going to address some of the most common mistakes and how you can avoid them and improve your website speed.

 

There are several websites that allow you to run a free test and check your website speed in real-time – some examples are below:

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• Google Page Speed Insights

• Gtmetrix

• Webpagetest

• Pingdom

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16 Top Tips to Increase Page Speed of Your WIX Website:

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Homepage should be simple and clean: The homepage is the gateway to your website and it should be simple and clean. Avoid using too many images, animations and videos on your homepage; do not make it overly long and deliver a precise message about your products and services through text on the homepage. A clear message delivered through meticulous catchy text can engage your customers in your website homepage and force them to stick to your website to explore it further.

 

Follow top to bottom rule: When people enter your website, the first section that loads is the top part of your website. A website generally loads from top to bottom therefore placing easy to load content on the top part of the page is good practise. You can place images, videos, animations or any apps in the bottom part of the page (although it is advisable not to use too many videos, images or apps on your website or on individual pages). The point is that the top part loads quickly and engages your customers while the rest of the page (bottom part) loads. We would recommend to display the most important information related to the page that customers need to know on the top part of the page, which can engage your customers while the bottom part loads.

 

Do not overload your webpages with images, animations & videos: Videos, large size images and animations take extra time to load due to their heavy bandwidth, and can slow down your website speed and cause speed performance issues. When using videos, images or animations make sure you use them in moderation and carry out real-time testing while developing your website pages to see what impact they have on your page speed. While using and embedding external videos from YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook into your website, be aware of the impact of loading time of these videos on your website. Although videos and animations look attractive to use, you should think about their impact on your website speed before using them.

 

Optimise the mobile version of your website: One of the major benefits of using WIX CMS is that it allows you to edit your mobile site and make changes to the mobile version separately. The mobile editor can dramatically improve your mobile site speed. You can hide large size images, videos, animations, photo galleries, iFrames or any other large size elements in the mobile editor separately, without hiding them in the desktop version on a WIX site. Therefore the WIX mobile version allows you to hide elements while keeping the same elements visible in the desktop version. Also, try to make your mobile site clean, simple and not to make individual pages overly lengthy. Deliver a concise message to engage your audience on your mobile site.

 

Compress images and use the right format: You can use free compression tools to compress your website images for better performance before uploading them on your WIX website. WIX states that it automatically compresses your images to WebP image format. WebP is a new image compression format by Google. WIX has clearly stated that it prefers JPEG files for images over PNG files because JPEG images load faster than PNG while retaining the same level of quality, and JPEG images are more web optimised as well. There are several free tools available online to convert PNG images to JPEG file format.

 

Use font cleverly on the webpages: It is always advisable to use popular web fonts on your website such as Helvetica, Times, Arial, Futura because they are already cached in most web browsers, and having a popular font on your website means you are automatically improving your website speed to a certain extent.

 

Prefer text over images or animations: Everybody knows text loads faster than images, animations & video, therefore using text over images and other media is always advisable to improve the speed of your website. You can easily deliver your message through text and engage your audience while the rest of your website loads. As we all know, Google and other search engines love informative text as it helps SEO and establishes website relevance to user queries. So using text in a professional manner over images can not only increase your website speed but also help to improve your rankings on Google and other search engines.

 

Stick to one or two font styles: It is good practise to stick to one or two font styles at most for your entire website because using a large number of font styles or custom fonts can affect your website speed as they take longer to load. Also, using different fonts means that you are showing inconsistency on your website and it doesn't look very professional to use different custom fonts.

 

Avoid using too many apps or plug-ins: Apps and plug-ins are generally made of scripts and CSS and require more bandwidth to load. In simple words, you can think of an app as a small website, so if you use an app on your website that means you are putting another small website within your website and it can impact your website speed. We only advise you to use apps when there is no other alternative and it becomes necessary to use an app on your business website. If you are using apps only to make your website look good, then we would advise to use an alternative that doesn't impact your website speed.

 

Avoid excessive use of slideshows & galleries: Slideshows and galleries apps are very large in size and when you put further images into them, they require more bandwidth to download. Though Slideshows and galleries look very attractive, they do impact your website speed performance on the WIX platform, so consider the page speed aspect when you use them on your website.

 

Avoid using multiple iFrames of your webpages: iFrames can dramatically slow down your website speed e.g. if you use 2 iFrames on one page, it means that single page (where you added 2 iFrames) will take as long as 3 pages take to load, therefore using multiple iFrames on your webpages can dramatically reduce your website speed.

 

Enable local browser caching: You can enable your local browser caching to improve your website loading time. Obviously, this is a local client side function and doesn’t improve website speed on the server side. It only helps to improve the client side website speed.

 

Follow simple header policy: The header is the section that is present on almost every webpage of your website and contributes to the website loading time. The header should be clean, simple and short. Only use the logo, tagline and text based minimum menu elements in the header section. Avoid putting items, images, social media links, button or animations into your header section. If you make your website header too large and heavy, it will take longer to load and put a negative impact on each individual page and overall website speed. A complex header confuses customers whereas simple and clean headers can engage your customers when they find information easily on your website through header navigational links.

 

Reduce re-directs & Fix broken links: Re-directs can have a negative impact on your website speed because each time a page re-directs to another page, some time is wasted in the HTTPS request. Although re-directs are required when a page is deleted or moved, having too many re-directs can create additional HTTPS requests and causes pages to load with delay. Also, fix your entire website broken links because they unnecessarily use bandwidth.

 

Cut down external scripts: If you are using any external scripts on your WIX website, make sure you test them first for the amount of impact they can put on your website speed. Using too many unnecessary scripts can have negative impacts on your website speed. 

 

Take advantage of caching: This is a new feature created by WIX to cache your webpages. It is a very good feature mainly for static pages. Webpage caching on WIX helps to speed up page loading time significantly compared to pages that are not cached. Although WIX has enabled automatic caching for most pages, if you wish you can check and set your own caching parameters via the advanced settings of each page in your WIX control panel.

 

Website speed is very important because if you have a website that takes longer to load, customers will not stay on your website and jump to another website which forces Google algorithms to consider that your website is creating a bad experience for your customers and is not a good online resource. This process can increase your website bounce rate and may drop your website rankings on Google and other search engines.

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To sum up, WIX is a very good platform and your website can run super fast if you can avoid common mistakes that generally affect the page speed. In fact, your website can run slow on any other platform such as wordpress, weebly, squarespace or another independent hosting provider if you use excessive images with animations, different fonts and videos and do not address those factors that affect website speed. If you think and learn about website speed factors before designing your new website, you can certainly make a big difference to your website speed performance.

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