Your dispensary website needs to do more than look impeccable — it needs to perform well too. And when it comes to optimal performance, you don’t want to underestimate the importance of website speed.
How quickly your website pages load has a direct impact on your dispensary. For one thing, load times affect your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. They’re one of the many factors Google considers when determining where you rank in the search results.
Page load speeds also affect the online customer experience and perceptions of your brand. The longer it takes for your dispensary site to load, the greater the risk that potential customers will give up and go elsewhere.
In short, a fast website is key. Here, we’ll share seven tips on how to improve website speed.
1. Know Your Current Speed
Before you start implementing changes, find out where your dispensary website currently stands. Using Google PageSpeed Insights, you can measure the speed of your site on both desktop and mobile. You’ll also receive suggestions for improvement.
2. Compress Your Images
Great images are an essential part of an effective dispensary website design. However, they can slow your site down significantly if they’re too large. Compressing your images reduces their size. That shrinks the size of your webpages, allowing them to load more quickly.
3. Find and Remove Redirect Chains
A page redirect occurs when the requested URL takes a website visitor to another URL. Sometimes, often accidentally, redirect chains can build. The requested URL gets redirected multiple times before it reaches its final destination, which means the page takes longer to load. Finding and removing unnecessary redirects can help improve website speed.
4. Enable Caching
Caching refers to storing copies of your website’s files so that a server doesn’t have to do as much work to deliver a page to a visitor’s browser. You can have your hosting service do this at the server level or enable browser caching. Either way, the stored files allow for faster page loading.
5. Minify Code
Remove spaces, characters, and other unnecessary elements from your HTML, CCS, or JavaScript code. If you don’t have the time or technical knowledge to comb through every line of code yourself, a plugin like Autoptimize can take care of the task for you.
6. Use a CDN
A content delivery network (content distribution network or CDN) is a network of servers that work with your website hosting service to improve page loading speeds. The server that hosts your site sends copies of your website content to other servers across your home state (and even around the world), reducing the geographical distance your dispensary site has to travel to reach the browsers of potential visitors.
7. Hire a Pro
A lot goes into creating a fully optimized website. You could use a dispensary website builder and manage the task yourself — or you can trust your dispensary website design needs to a team of professionals like Highopes. Using our expertise in cannabis branding and website design, Highopes works with you to develop a one-of-a-kind website for your dispensary that delivers results.
Create a Great Customer Online Experience With a Beautiful, Fast-Loading Cannabis Website
A faster website can go a long way in boosting your SEO and attracting (and retaining) dispensary customers. Highopes is here to help. Visit us online to learn more about our website design services, or contact us today to get started.
