Do you like waiting? Your answer would be “Obviously, No.” Waiting is no more exciting thing to do because the patience level of people are going down with more and more efficient evolution’s come in to play, specially with the Internet age.
To get the viewer engaged in your site, it is necessary that the users at least have a look to your website. If your website is too good, but taking too much time to load, you will lose many of the viewers and eventually buyer prospects.
How to Improve Your Website Speed
Amazon has reported that if your site speed is improved by 100 milliseconds, then your revenue will be increased by 8%. So, now I hope you got that only the good layout and content of your site are not enough for user engagement. The speed of your website also plays the vital role here.
If you are still not convinced, Google has officially acknowledged that you will rank higher in SERPs if your website loads faster. Note: Take a backup of your website before following any of the steps below.
1. Reduce HTTP Requests
The images, scripts, flash, style sheet will affect the loading speed of your website as one HTTP request will be generated for each. So, you should remove elements which are not necessary. You can use CSS in place of images.
2. Reduce Redirects
The no. of redirects will increase the no. of HTTP request. More the HTTP requests, more time it will take to load your webpage. SO, in order to increase the speed of the website, you should remove extra redirects.
3. Use a CDN
You can get a quality articles from assistance from Edubirdie, but how to deliver it in fastest way? The answer is CDN. Content Delivery Network is collection of servers, located in different geographical locations in order to deliver the content more efficiently. From the available all servers, network with the lowest number of hops or the network with the fastest response time is chosen.
4. Specify Image Dimensions
The browser will start rendering the page before the images will be loaded. So, specify the dimensions of the image using height and width property of <img> tag. If you are not specifying the dimensions, browser will once reflow after the download of image.
5. Put CSS at the top and JS at the bottom
To avoid the progressive rendering, we should put style sheet in document head. So, user will see white page until the entire site is loaded. Thus, you can make a webpage as per the W3 Standards. Same goes for JavaScript, code of JS is put in the bottom of the document to follow the W3 Standards.
6. Browser Caching can come to your rescue
Yeah, you all know caching right? In caching, your requested webpages will be stored on your hard drive by browser. So, it will load faster if you are requesting the same page later. The caching elements will expire within 1 week to 1 year.
7. Minimize the number of plugins
A large number of plugins installed on your site will lead to slower loading site and other security issues. So, selectively remove the unnecessary plugins and see the difference in your website loading speed.
8. Use Compression
If the size of your page is too large, then you can do compression to decrease the loading time. Compression will reduce the bandwidth of the pages, thereby reducing HTTP response.
9. Remove query string from static resources
You can’t cache a link with “?”, as it acts as “Ctrl+F5”. You should use query strings for dynamic resources only.
10. Specify character set
To speed up the browser rendering, you need to add a piece of code specifying the character set in the header of HTML file.
Once again, I am emphasizing on the backup of your site before applying these techniques for security purpose. Do share this article and feel free to comment other techniques to improve the website speed. 🙂
