A fast-loading website is crucial for growing your dentistry business online. Speeding up your site becomes easier by creating and implementing a strategic plan. Your strategy must include the best speed optimization tips for dental practice websites.
Enhancing your dental website’s load time makes you optimistic about your dental clinic’s growth. In the future, you may receive exponentially higher traffic. Only a fast-loading site can handle tremendous traffic without ruining the user experience.
This blog will help you optimize your dental practice website for faster load speed. Here, you’ll find the top 14 tips to include in your speed optimization strategy.
Highlights
- Compressing images, lazy loading, limiting HTTP requests, and minifying CSS and Javascript are a few speed optimization tips for dental practice websites.
- Website speed optimization is crucial for a better conversion rate, less bounce rate, and enhanced SEO performance.
- Dental websites should load within 1 or 2 seconds for a better user experience.
- Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTMetrix, and WebPageTest are a few online speed-testing tools.
What is Website Speed Optimization?
Website speed optimization is a process of enhancing various components of your website to load faster. A website that loads quickly will be tremendously beneficial for your business.
Optimizing your website’s speed includes a complex set of strategies and you need to take care of every small detail. You may need to change your site format, content, codes, plugins, etc. for an optimal website load time.
14 Speed Optimization Tips for Dental Practice Websites
Here are a few speed optimization tips for dental practice websites to include in your strategy:
1. Compress Images
The bulkiest component of your dental website is likely its images. But you can’t remove them completely from your site. Otherwise, it’ll provide a bad user experience to your website visitors.
That’s why you must compress the images before uploading them to your website. TinyPNG, JPEG Optimizer, Compress Now, ImageRecycle, and Optimole Image Compressor are a few image compression tools.
The best image format to speed up your dental website is WebP. It preserves the quality of your image although being much smaller than JPEG in File size.
2. Implement Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is the concept of loading a certain portion of a webpage only when it’s needed. The browser doesn’t request these resources unless the user interacts with the page in a way that requires those components to come into the display.
You can implement lazy loading for images and videos on your dental website. Upon doing that, only when a visitor scrolls down, their browser will load these elements to their screen.
An example of lazy loading is when you insert a banner image at the top of a blog and a dental surgery diagram at the bottom. Now, your potential patient’s browser will load that diagram only when they scroll down while reading the blog content.
3. Remove Unwanted Plugins
Plugins are add-ons or extensions that you add to your dental website for their useful features. However, excessive plugins can slow down your site as they require more resources to run.
So, you have to limit the number of plugins to install on your website and remove the unwanted ones. Also, if a plugin generates many database queries or loads a lot of scripts, you can replace it with its alternative.
Moreover, you have to keep updating the plugins with their latest versions.
4. Evaluate Your Hosting Provider
Choosing the right hosting provider will determine the load speed of your dental website. Their geographical location, physical infrastructure, overall bandwidth, and other factors will affect your site’s performance.
Cloudways, WP Engine, Bluehost, Dreamhost, and Hostinger are some of the top hosting providers for your dental website.
Make sure you select the right plan based on your needs. Some of the popular packages are Shared, VPS, and Dedicated. Cloud Hosting is also gaining popularity since it distributes data in multiple servers leading to faster websites.
5. Limit HTTP Requests
The number of HTTP requests a browser needs to make to load each element of your dental website determines its load time. You can enhance your site speed by limiting the requests required to fully load all of its components.
The browser will make many requests if the site has more assets, such as stylesheets, images, scripts, fonts, etc. Also, if your dental site has larger file sizes, the browser will make longer HTTP requests.
Thus, your website shouldn’t contain excessive or large components. Jeffrey Vocell, Hubspot’s product marketing manager, suggests that the number of files on your site should not exceed 30.
6. Optimize for Mobile Devices
The number of mobile internet users is growing each year. Although a desktop version of your dental website might load on mobile devices, it’ll result in slow load time and other issues.
Your potential patient might be relying on smartphones, tablets, etc. to learn more about your dental practice. Investing in a mobile-native website will help resolve speed-related issues on any mobile device.
7. Minify CSS and Javascript
CSS and Javascript are among the largest files on your dental website. Browsers must send individual requests to the server for each CSS and JS file to render them. Minifying these files will reduce the duration of the request, enhancing the site speed.
Minification refers to removing unnecessary elements in the source codes. For instance, you can start by eliminating line breaks, comments, spaces characters, unused variables, and more.
There are two ways to minify CSS and Javascript. You can manually remove the non-essential components or use online tools like CSSMinifier and UglifyJS.
8. Enable Caching
Storing a copy of the most frequently assessed components of your website in the server refers to caching. After that, whenever someone visits your website, their browser will fetch the pre-saved version of the site from the server faster.
Saving cache files in your server prevents excessive rendering of these elements whenever it receives requests from the browser.
You can also enable saving the static version of your dental website on your potential patient’s browser. Whenever they revisit your site, the browser will display the pre-saved version instead of requesting information again.
Make sure you set expiration duration for these cache files, for instance, 30 days. The browser and server will eventually load an updated version of the website after the cache expires.
9. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Your potential patient’s location will determine whether the dental website loads fast or not. Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps in handling requests coming from distant destinations with its multiple caching approach.
Instead of saving your website’s essential components on a single server, CDN creates multiple copies. Then, it spreads them over the servers located in various geographical locations.
So, whenever your potential client’s browser sends a request from far away, they’ll receive a fast response from their nearby server location. This method works best if your dental clinic has a multinational presence.
10. Select Fewer Fonts
Another crucial tactic to optimize your dental website for speed is to use web-safe fonts. The most common examples include Arial, Georgia, and Times New Roman. These fonts work without any additional resources on most of the devices.
You also have to decrease the number of fonts for your website. This way, the visitor’s browser will request fewer file requests from your site’s server. Also, ‘less is more’ when it comes to a website’s aesthetic and functionality.
11. Fix 404 Errors
If your dental website is missing any pages or some crucial files, the server will send a 404 error. Your potential patient’s browser will show this error after getting the response from the server.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Google Webmaster Tool, and Screaming Frog are a few tools that can identify 404 errors.
You need to resolve this issue quickly because these errors will put a load on your site’s server. Consequently, the website loads slower. You can either set redirects or fix the link address to prevent 404 error messages from coming from the server.
12. Handle Render-Blocking Resources
When your potential patient visits your dental website, several elements start to load on their browser. Among them, stylesheets, scripts, and HTML imports are the render-blocking elements that block or delay the rendering process.
After these resources delay the rendering, users will see a blank screen for a few moments in their browser. This makes them think your website takes more time to load, and they might exit your site.
You must defer or asynchronously load these render-blocking resources. If they’re not essential, removing them altogether will help display the initial page content faster.
13. Avoid 301 Redirect
Whenever your potential patient clicks on a link within your dental website, the browser loads that page. But, if that page isn’t available on the server, it sends a 301 error message and redirects to another page.
The entire redirect process takes up additional HTTP requests that will slow down the site load speed. So, you have to identify such redirects on your dental website and remove them immediately.
SiteAnalyzer, Screaming Frog, and Redirect Checker by SmallSEOTools, are a few tools to audit for 301 redirects on your website.
14. Use Less Animations
Animations can make your website captivating to your potential patients. But, if they don’t add much value to the user experience, it’s better to not use them.
Animations require more resources to render from the server and take more time to load. So, choose an alternative visual asset to portray the same message that an animation can do.
However, if animations are essential on your dentistry practice website, try lightweight animation options. For instance, CSS animations are lighter than the Javascript-based ones.
Why Does Your Dental Website Need Speed Optimization?
Speed optimization is essential for your website. If it loads with a delay, your potential patients will have a bad experience. As a result, they won’t view your clinic with trust and might exit the website quickly, increasing your bounce rate.
Your website’s load time also determines its conversion rate. If your dental site loads fast, then only your potential patient will engage with it. Consequently, they might book an appointment at your clinic.
Thus, you need to optimize your dental website to decrease its bounce rate, increase the conversion rate, etc. Besides, it’ll help you grow your dentistry practice by enhancing the clinic’s online presence.
How Fast Should a Dental Practice Website Load?
Make sure your dental website is as fast as possible. If it loads within 1 or 2 seconds then it’ll build credibility in the eyes of your potential patients.
Besides, your website should perform better on all devices, not just desktops. Google mentioned that more than 50 percent of visitors leave the mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Also, websites taking 3 seconds to load have a higher bounce rate than a site that loads completely within a second. Thus, always try to aim for 1 second or less.
How to Check The Speed of Your Dental Website?
You can get help from the top website speed testing tools to check your dental practice site. They measure server response time, browser rendering, and other factors.
Here are a few speed-testing tools for your dental practice website:
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
2. Pingdom
3. GTMetrix
4. WebPageTest
5. Sematext
These tools help you easily identify and optimize the components of your dental website that need attention.
Does Optimizing Dental Website Speed Help in SEO?
One of the most beneficial reasons to optimize your website for speed is to get better SEO results. Your dental website can rank higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) if it loads faster.
Google takes site load speed as a direct ranking signal. So, you can only rank at the top results of Google’s result pages if your website takes significantly less time to load.
Can Adding Online Appointment Software Affect Dental Website Speed?
You can integrate online appointment software into your dental practice site. With this feature, your patients can book an appointment even outside office hours.
However, it can add more load to your website’s rendering on the user’s browser, slowing down the speed. Thus, you must make the software lightweight to produce shorter HTTP requests.
Conclusion
If you implement all of the above speed optimization tips, you’ll see significant improvement in your dental website’s load time. After that, the benefits you receive from a fast-loading site are tremendous.
You must keep enhancing your website until the load time is less than 1 or 2 seconds. Even after that, check the speed regularly using various online tools and optimize your site when needed.
