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HOW TO INCREASE WEBSITE SPEED
(3 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)- May 17, 2022
- by Admin
Today, every organization wants its website to deliver fantastic user experience, regardless of their niche or industry. A site that delights returning or new users has to perform better than others. As your customer’s growth on the site continues, you forget to remember the importance of website load speed.
What is Website Speed?
Website speed is often described as “website load time,” the time it takes to display the content fully on a particular page. Also, it is called “time to first byte,” how long the website takes for your browser to receive the first byte of data from the specific server. You can evaluate your website speed with Google’s Insights.
Simple Guide to Increase your Website Speed
If you are able to speed up your website, you can gain a significant advantage over your competitors with slow loading time. You will always want to aim for your web pages to load within three seconds or less. Because 40 per cent of the traffic can abandon the website if it takes more than three seconds to load. The lower you have the loading time, the better will your business grow.
Here is the guide that can help you to speed up your website. These are the simple factors that can surely ensure the website loading time. So read it carefully before making any necessary changes to your site.
Minimize your HTTP requests
The HTTP requests are generated for every element of your website, such as stylesheets, scripts, and images.
According to research, 80 per cent of the site loading time is based on the web page’s downloading elements. So if you have plenty of these components on your site, then you have more HTTP requests.
By using the developer tools settings, you can quickly identify how many requests your site is currently making. After that, you can take some necessary steps to lower down that number. You must simplify the design and reduce clutter on your website.
Also, you must remove unnecessary redirects. These redirects are mostly used for fixing the broken links, and thus they create extra HTTP requests, which can slow down the website speed.
Reduce the TTFB (time to first byte)
The term TTFB refers to the time that web browsers require to wait before receiving information from the server. Basically, it signifies how long the web page takes to start loading.
The TTFB is based on three factors:
- Response time
- Process request time
- HTTP request time
If your site offers fast TTFB, then your requests can be transferred to the browser faster. Therefore, your content will be loaded more quickly for the visitors. You must have a TTFB of less than 200ms.
Some common reasons associated with slow TTFB are:
- Website traffic
- Content creation
- Network issues
- Server configuration
The best way to lower down your TTFB is by enabling the web browser cache.
Choose a Reliable Web Hosting Plan
Choosing a cheaper plan is not always better. When you have a new website, you might always think of going with a low budget hosting plan. But when your web traffic increases, you must ensure that your web hosting plan is upgraded.
The types of web hosting are:
- Cloud Hosting
- Dedicated server hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Shared Hosting
The plan you select and the provider you use can impact your website speed. So, choose that package, which can meet all your business requirements.
Run Compression Audits
If you want your website to become fast, you must compress your files as small as possible. Also, make sure that you are not damaging the quality. Smaller files take much less time to load. Therefore, it will increase your website speed.
Reduce your Images Size
Visual elements are always necessary for your website. Without any image, your site will look untrustworthy, unprofessional, and probably boring.
But, by adding images, you will also slow down your website loading time. It is a significant problem, especially if you are running an ecommerce business.
Even those websites that do not sell anything should reduce the size of their images. An average blog post contains 3.2 images.
You can use any reliable tool to compress your images without damaging the quality of them. Once the images are compressed, make sure that you are saving them in the correct file type. Mostly, JPG will be the best option. You can also use PNG images for graphics, which contains precise detail such as a Logo.
Minify and Combine Files
Every file on your website can increase the loading time. If your site includes plenty of data, then they will need extra HTTP requests, which will increase the loading time.
But you cannot remove everything. So, you must minify and combine them. This can be done for:
- Google fonts
- JavaScript files
- CSS files
- HTML files
By minifying, you can eliminate unnecessary characters from your files, like white space and formatting. It will automatically get rid of anything, which is not required for the code to function. Ultimately, this will reduce your file size.
Combining the files can reduce the number of HTTP requests by arranging them into small groups. For instance, a web browser can download six small files quickly than one big file.
Use Asynchronous Loading
Once your JavaScript and CSS files are combined and minified, you must optimize them in a specific way. You have two options:
- Asynchronous loading
- Synchronous loading
The files that are loading synchronously will load one at a particular time, depending upon the location on the web page. The primary issue is that, if a single file is taking a long time to load, then other files will not load until that file is loaded completely.
In asynchronous loading, you can load files simultaneously. If any file is taking longer to load, then you can load other elements of your web page without any delay.
Install a CDN (Content delivery network)
As everyone knows, a website is loaded on a server. When someone visits your website, a request is sent to that particular server. If you have high levels of traffic on your site, then the requests will take some time to process, which can slow down the site for the users.
High web traffic is a great thing for the website. The last you will want is that the visitors abandon your site because of slow loading speed.
CDNs cache your website on several networks of the global servers. So, if someone requests to download a file from your site, it will automatically get routed to the closest server to the physical location.
How to Speed Up Mobile Website Performance
According to a study, one second delay in page loading time decreases 11 per cent page views, seven per cent conversion loss, and 16 percent customer satisfaction. This is the reason why it is essential to improve your mobile website performance.
Here are things that can help you to speed up your mobile site performance:
Minimize and Measure Server Response Time
Mobile web page speed depends upon your web coding, and also it is based upon your server. The longer your server takes to respond, the slower will be your web page load time. It is recommended that your server should start transmitting the first byte of information within 200ms of a request.
It is known as “time to first byte” or “waiting time.” There are three significant procedures for decreasing your server response time:
- Reduce the resources needed by your web pages.
- Improve your web server configuration or software.
- Enhance the quality of your web hosting service by ensuring adequate memory and CPU resources.
- Minimize or avoid redirects to increase the mobile page speed
Redirects are generally instructions, which automatically take the visitors from one web page to another. Each redirect consumes several milliseconds, which slow down the page loading time. This issue is mostly seen on mobile devices, as they are dependent on less reliable networks as compared to desktop users.
Measure round-trip times
RTT (round-trip time) is a time required for a request to transmit data from a mobile device or a desktop to a target destination, like a remote computer. It can be measured by pinging a particular address. The interval of RTT depends on several factors such as number of requests handled by the server, traffic amount, number of nodes between them, a connection medium, connection source and so on.
It is best to reduce the quantity of sequential round trips by ensuring that the resources are transmitted in parallel by removing the excess weight.
Put JavaScript at the bottom and the CSS at the top of HTML files
JavaScript enables interactivity to your web pages and prevents parallel downloads. When the script code is loading, the web browser will not start other downloads. To speed up the page load, you must move the JavaScript’s to the bottom of the web page. It will allow the HTML content to display before the script is loaded.
CSS signifies how HTML elements should be displayed on your Web page. By putting it in front, the web browser will display the content as soon as possible.
Conclusion
The importance of Website speed should never be overlooked. Website loading time can either make or break the growth of your website. So, read the article carefully and understand why it is essential, and what you should do to increase the website speed.
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