Having a website is essential in today’s business world, especially if you’re an HVAC company. Customers use it to research and evaluate your services before meeting you. However, having the right website design isn’t enough. Speed matters! If your website takes more than three-five seconds to load fully, most potential customers will close the page and try one of your competitors.
Creating a website for your HVAC company can be an invaluable tool, allowing you to attract new customers, give them information about the services you offer, and even allow them to schedule services online if they choose. But with so many different businesses on the internet competing for traffic and attention, how do you make sure your website stands out? We’ve put together this list of the top 11 ways to improve the speed of your HVAC company website.
1: Enable compression:
Your HVAC company’s website isn’t just about how it looks; it’s also about how fast it loads! If your site takes too long to load, prospective customers will get frustrated and go to your competitor instead. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to optimize your website’s loading speed. Image compression is a great way to boost your landing page loading speed. If your website is on a CMS platform like WordPress, you can use a plugin to accomplish this.
2: Minify JavaScript, HTML:
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files can cause web pages to load slowly if they’re too large. Fortunately, there are several techniques you can use to help them load faster without changing the functionality of your site or sacrificing security or search engine optimization (SEO). One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve loading speed is using your CSS files’ proper compression and minification tools. That way, you can reduce the file size of your code without causing any errors in how it’s displayed.
3: Minify CSS:
If you own an HVAC company, there are many reasons to make your website as fast as possible. According to the Aberdeen Group, 94% of customers care about how long it takes for their website to load, and 80% will abandon their shopping cart if the site takes too long to load. So if you want your HVAC business to survive in today’s marketplace, you need to make sure that your website loading speed doesn’t cost you any new business opportunities. Let’s look at ways to optimize your website’s loading speed using CSS minification.
When it comes to improving the speed of your website, one of the best things you can do is to minimize the number of unnecessary HTTP requests that are sent from your server when it loads up your pages. One way to do this is to minify your CSS since CSS files can be huge and often include lots of new information (for example, if the font used in your CSS file is already included in the HTML code). By minifying CSS, you’ll reduce its file size, reducing the total number of bytes that need to be downloaded by your visitors’ browsers when they load up your website.
4: Reduce redirects:
Optimizing your website’s loading speed is an essential step in improving your site’s rank in search engine results, not to mention making it more user-friendly and attractive to current and potential clients. Redirects are often a cause of slowed load times, so here are some ways you can optimize your redirects to reduce their impact on your load time while keeping the same or better functionality with your website.
Redirects are necessary in some cases, such as when you need to redirect traffic from one subdomain to another or want to direct traffic from an old URL to the new one. The best way to minimize this is by constantly monitoring old and new URLs to ensure that none is broken and removing plugins that generate unnecessary redirects.
5: Remove render-blocking JavaScript:
Website speed is essential in search engine optimization, conversion rates, and overall user experience. You have to remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS files from your pages to optimize your website speed. Other methods require using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP) technology to reduce loading times without adding render-blocking JavaScript to your site.
6: Leverage browser caching:
The average internet user’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter, which means that if your website takes too long to load, you could lose them before they even get through the door.
HVAC companies that want to provide the best service possible need to make sure their websites are as fast as possible so their customers don’t encounter issues while browsing the site or downloading any content.
Over half of all online shoppers state that they won’t purchase from websites that load slowly, so it’s no surprise that companies who optimize their site’s loading speed see an increase in their conversion rate by as much as 24%. When you leverage browser caching, the browser will save information about the website so that less bandwidth is needed to load the page the next time you visit a page.
7: Improve server response time:
Decreasing server response time can increase website loading speed, and many companies also offer these services as part of their maintenance packages. A recent study showed that slow-loading websites could lose up to 70% of their viewers within 8 seconds of the first-page load, so improving server response time should be a top priority if you don’t want to be losing business.
8: Optimize images:
If you run an HVAC company, your website plays an essential role in getting new customers. Fortunately, there are ways to optimize your images and make your site load faster than ever before, saving you time and money. One of the best ways to optimize your images is by changing the file type from a png to a jpg. The only exceptions are icons and small logos.
9: Minimize HTTP requests:
The more HTTP requests you make, the longer it takes your website to load, which affects your visitors’ experience of your site and how likely they are to return later on. This is why you must focus on minimizing your HTTP request. One of the best solutions is to replace large and inefficient plugins with mores that are smaller and more efficient. Another solution that could be implemented is the enabling of lazy load.
10: Minimize time to first byte:
When it comes to website speed optimization, you want to be sure that the time between when your users hit the load button and when they see your site content is as short as possible. Minimizing time to the first byte, or TTFB can significantly help your loading speed and user experience, especially on mobile devices where latency tends to be higher.
When it comes to website speed optimization, one of the most critical factors is the time to first byte (TTFB), which indicates how quickly the server returns data to the browser when it receives a request. You can reduce TTFB by using caching and CDN, improving your database, switching from shared hosting to dedicated hosting, and reducing queries.
11: Defer JavaScript loading:
Your website must load quickly to provide the best experience possible to your clients. Unfortunately, many HVAC company websites suffer from slow load times because of the amount of third-party JavaScript loaded on each page request. Allowing JavaScript to defer enables HTML parsing to continue while the browser fetches the scripts. So essentially, a script with the defer will not block the page from loading.