Here's How to Make Your Weebly Website Much Faster

Trying to Boost the Loading Speed of Your Weebly Website?

The speed at which your website loads is critical.

Not only are slow loading times a detriment for users (most users will leave a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load) but they are also a big performance hit when it comes to search engine ranking.

Boosting your website's loading speed will:

• Significantly improve your website's search engine in Google and other search engines.
• Increase the amount of traffic your website gets.
• Improve the user experience of your website.
• Increase conversions.
• Help you attract more customers.

As you can see, loading times are one of the most critical components of any website, especially Weebly websites.

But then the question is: how do I improve my Weebly website's loading speed?

1). Make Sure You're Using an Optimized Weebly Theme

Your Weebly website's theme is the core of your website.

It's what dictates your website's code and technical structure.

All those technical bits and code are run within your theme.

Unfortunately, many Weebly themes are poorly optimized and contain bloated code, giving your website a significant performance hit for no reason.

That's why it's critical to take a look at which Weebly theme you're running.

If you're using a free default Weebly theme (the themes that come in Weebly), unfortunately you're missing out.

Default Weebly themes contain older bloated code that can significantly hamper your website's loading speed.

The good news is you can simply install a better theme in seconds, with no change to your existing website.

Our premium Weebly themes contain advanced optimized code that help significantly boost the loading quickness and search engine performance of your Weebly website.

We're listing this as the first step because it's by far the easiest--installing one of our premium Weebly themes takes just five seconds.

In five seconds, you can significantly boost both the loading speed and search engine performance of your Weebly website.

This is all due to the modern advanced code frameworks that power our Weebly themes.

2). Go Easy on the Images

Logically, your website's loading speed is significantly dependent on how big your webpage is, in terms of size.

That is--how much stuff is on your website.

A significant contributor to your webpage size are images.

You'll want to use online tools such as PicResize to optimize your website images.

The smaller your website images, the better the loading speeds will be on your Weebly website.

It's important to note, however, that you don't want to make your website images too small in size, or else you'll just have a webpage full of blurry low-res images.

While that's great for loading speeds, it's not so good for user experience.

When it comes to images, you need to keep in mind that the cumulative weight of images is what matters.

If you have one high quality image with a decently high file size, that's okay.

But if you have several of them, that's going to yield a big hit to your loading speeds.

It's a good idea to optimize all images on your site, and be mindful of how many images are on the site in general.

There's a bit of a "goldilocks" zone when it comes to website images.

You don't want your images to be too big, you want to keep them at as low of a file size as reasonable, but at the same time you don't want them too small or else you'll end up with a low resolution image.

Also, keep in mind file formats. JPG images are generally more "optimized" and smaller in file size than PNG images.

But--PNG images contain several features that JPG images don't, such as the ability to add transparent backgrounds.

At the end of the day, it's all a cost vs. benefit analysis.

3). Go Easy on the Weebly Apps

Weebly has this great App marketplace, which lets you add various apps to your Weebly website.

Many of these apps add incredible features to your Weebly website, features that your business might not operate without.

But it's important to be mindful of how many Apps you install on your Weebly website.

With every single App that you install, your Weebly website will get slower.

You see, installing an App basically adds a bunch of code to your website.

It adds another layer of components and code complexity.

That's why it's a good idea to be minimal when it comes to using Apps.

Is there some App feature that could be done in Weebly by default? 

Going easier on Weebly apps will also have the beneficial effect of speeding up the Weebly website editor experience.

4). Run Audits on Your Website With Free Online Tools

Everybody should definitely be running audits on their website.

There are tons of free tools out there which give you critical insight about how optimized your website is.

We're talking metrics like loading speed, user experience, search engine ranking, etc.

If you're not using these tools already, you should be.

Google Analytics - Great for Traffic Monitoring

The first one is Google Analytics. This platform will give you critical insight into the search engine and traffic performance of your Weebly website.

Weebly does have analytics built-in, but they are exceed by Google Analytics which has superior tracking and analytical performance.

Google Search Console - Critical for Search Ranking Performance and User Experience Audits

The second tool that you should be using is Google Search Console.

Google Search console is phenomenal because it provides a ton of easy-to-digest insight into specifically your website's search ranking characteristics.

We're talking things like what keywords people enter into Google to find your website, what your website's ranking is on various keywords, and whether Google crawlers have any issues with your website.

Google Search Console will also automatically scan your website and identify just how good it is with user experience.

PageSpeed Insights by Google - Automatically Scans Your Website To See How "Fast" It Is.

PageSpeed Insights is another great tool by Google.

This one is super simple to use and extremely useful.

Simply paste your URL into PageSpeed (link above) and it will automatically scan your Weebly website on both desktop and mobile simulations to identify how quick and optimized it is.

At the end of the scan, you'll see a bunch of metrics which show how optimized your site is.

It's an amazing tool to use in order to quantify your website speed performance.

Final Remarks

Those are the four strategies we recommend the most in improving your website's loading performance.

Your website has various components which are responsible for user experience, discovery, and search performance.

All of these factors are very much inter-dependent.

What we mean by this is: focusing on boosting your websites loading speed will inevitably lead to a strong improvement in your website's search engine ranking.

This "whole" holistic approach to website development will help you build a best-in-class Weebly website that gives your business a power up.