Every website owner expects visitors to spend more time on their site, navigate various pages, read the available content and take the desired action. In order to ensure the successful completion of all these actions, websites need to load in the least possible time.
If a website takes more time to load, it frustrates visitors and they leave the site at once. Such disappointed visitors hardly visit a slow loading website in the future.
On the other hand, search engines count website loading speed as an important factor when they have to display results against the keywords used by visitors. They prefer fast loading websites to give visitors a pleasant browsing experience. So, slow loading websites are slapped with a lower ranking in SERPs, causing high bounce rates and a gradual degradation of online business coming from them.
So, what can you do to make your website fast? There are numerous measures using which you can make it load faster on all devices. Just cast a quick glance on some important measures:
1. Keep your website design minimalistic
A site may have a number of components such as pages, categories, sub-categories, tags, visual design elements, etc. The complex design and framework of your site may contribute significantly to its overall loading speed and may drive visitors away.
So, you must try to keep your website design simple and minimalistic as far as possible and display only a few elements to load. It makes your site super light and help visitors to access it quickly on their devices.
2. Merge HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
The web pages that you see in your browser are made up of 3 different technologies- HTML, Javascript, and CSS. When a user makes a request on your site, these 3 come into action to display the requested information.
If these files work independently, they put excessive pressure on your site's server and can make your site slow. In order to eliminate this problem, you should merge HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files and make them one.
When you do so, it eliminates excessive white space characters, comments, new line characters, and block unwanted delimiters. As a result, the volume of code transfer gets reduced up to a great extent, enabling visitors to access web pages quickly.
Through Coding:
For this, web developers need to use human friendly code format in place of complicated codes.
Sample code:
<form action="#" method="post">
<div>
<label for="name">Text Input:</label>
<input type="text" name="name" id="name" value="" tabindex="1" />
</div>
</form>
New approach: <form action="#" method="post"><div><label for="name">Text Input:</label>.
3. Abolish duplicate codes in your website or its pages
Duplicate JavaScript and CSS files create needless HTTP requests and exert more pressure on your site's server. It can make your website slow and decrease its performance considerably.
Therefore, you should be careful while writing codes for your website and its pages. It is also important for you to conduct an extensive search and find all duplicate codes in external files. If you do this manually, it can consume a lot of time and energy. So, you can utilize script management tools.
4. Think of making JavaScript and CSS external
If you use external files on your site, your website will load quickly because in that case CSS and JS files are cached by the browser used by visitors to access the site. Besides this, you can place the CSS files in the HEAD element to make your website super fast.
5. Image optimization
These days, images are widely used on websites to attract visitors and boost the readability of the website. But, using high-resolution and large size images can make your site slow.
Therefore, you should implement image optimization on your website. Use the right image format and compress them using image compression tools. You can also use the lazy loading technique. When you use this technique, images on your website are loaded only when visitors click on them. It reduces the volume of HTTP request, saves your bandwidth and makes your website faster.
6. Cut the volume of HTTP requests to your site's server
The loading time of your website is determined by the number of HTTP requests made to its server. If there is an abundance of HTTP requests, the server will take more time to deliver the results for the requested information. You can take the following action to reduce the HTTP requests to your site's server:
l Use a CDN. It will enable you to deliver the exact results for user's request using the nearest server (depending on the geographical location of visitors).
l Implement website caching. It helps your website to display the requested results from static pages rather than passing a request to the site's server.
Through coding practice:
This can be done by including all the CSS in one stylesheet. For this, web developers use the following code-
@import url('myCss.css');
Instead of this, they should write like-
<link rel='stylesheet' href='myCSS.css'>
7. Reduce your site's baggage
A website's baggage can be anything such as a massive database, too many backups, plugins, redirections, saved posts, comments, trackbacks, badly configured server, etc. If you want to make your site fast, you should cleanConclusion up unnecessary and unused stuff from your website and make it light. A light website uses a few resources and leads quickly on all devices.
8. Use an authentic hosting plan
Most of the website owner neglect the huge importance of choosing a good hosting plan for their sites. When they choose a wrong hosting plan, it not only makes their websites slow but also expose them to various security vulnerabilities.
There are several types of hosting plans-
l Shared hosting.
l VPS.
l Public Cloud.
l Private Cloud.
l Dedicated hosting.
If you run a professional website that receives a fair amount of traffic, you should choose dedicated, VPS or cloud hosting plans.
9. Check website loading speed frequently
From time-to-time, you must check your site loading speed using website speed test tools. It will help you to know that factors that are making your website slow. Based on the output, you can fix those elements and make your site fast.
Conclusion
If you utilize the above-mentioned tips, you can speed up your website easily. It can help you to find a better placement in search engine results, appreciation from visitors and a sharp increase in your online business.