Website design companies are trusted with the task of creating websites that are smooth, secure, and reliable. Currently, the internet houses around 2 billion websites. Websites built for a single purpose compete with thousands of similar websites. Visiting a website that takes hours to load is a sore point for every user. Thus, every client wants their website to run smoothly and fast.
This article guides every website owner who wants to boost their website’s loading time. Follow the tips listed in the article and see your website’s performance rocket.
Why Is A Faster Website Better?
A faster website holds many perks for the owner and users. When was the last time you waited minutes for a website to load? You would hardly remember. Every user wants to visit a website that loads quickly in seconds. Users tend to move to other sites if the website they visit is not ready in about 5 seconds. Though most websites take around 10 to 15 seconds to load, a waiting period longer than that means your website will lose visitors. Thus, a faster website is essential to maintain traffic through your website and increase its productivity.
What Factors Does A Website’s Speed Depend Upon?
If you are wondering what is causing your website to slow down, you might want to look for the following factors:
- Large Image size
- Speed of data transfer
- Number of APIs and Plugins
- Number of elements per page
- Low Bandwidth for website traffic
Tips To Speed Up Your Website:
Image Optimization
Creative agencies add many images and media to our websites to make them more interactive and captivating. But, if you are using un-optimized images and unsuitable image formats, your website will slow down.
Loading media requires downloading a lot of data. The more data to be downloaded, the longer the load takes.
To reduce the size of the images, you should compress them and use smaller formats. Different image compression tools are available on the internet that you can use to reduce the image size.
Regarding formats, PNG and JPEG are the most popular choices for logos, icons, and other media. Another popular format is WebP. It offers excellent image quality in sizes smaller than JPEGs.
Optimize Website Code
Websites are built upon different types of files containing code. From its format, content, features, etc., everything is code. When a website is loaded, the browser requests these different JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files to run the website.
If your website’s code is large, it will take longer to download and load, slowing down your website.
The best way to overcome this is by minifying and optimizing the code. Removing whitespaces, comments, etc., will remove unnecessary bytes of data from the website’s code and reduce the loading time.
Reducing The Number Of Redirects
While reaching your website, if the user has to pass through different links, he might find your website slow.
When the browser opens your website, it makes HTTP/HTTPS requests to the server to get data on your website. If your website contains redirects, it must download data for them first. Every request made is queued and executed one after the other. Thus, if there are a lot of redirects, many requests would need to be created and processed, increasing the load time.
You can solve this by reducing redundant numbers of redirects.
Using A CDN
Content delivery networks are used to manage the sending and receiving of data. The CDN is a network of web servers spread throughout the world. It allows users to connect to the server nearest to the location. A server closer to the location means a shorter time to receive the data.
A website that does not use the CDN might have to connect to servers located in distant parts of the world. The information would need a longer time to travel the distance apart. This can affect the loading time of a website, even if it is in milliseconds. By using a CDN, you can quickly reduce the loading time of your website by connecting to nearby servers.
Reducing TTFB
The Time To First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of data from the server. When you want to visit a website, the browser has to perform a few actions to establish a secure connection with the website. It includes DNS lookups, handshakes, etc.
If this process consumes more time than required, then it will increase the load time of your website. This can be prevented by reducing TTFB. A good value for TTFB is around 200ms.
Using a faster host service, a premium DNS provider, improving database queries, etc., will help you reduce the TTFB.
Lazy Loading Ads
The concept of lazy loading ads is to download and display ads right at the time when the user can view them. Ads are placed in different locations by the branding agencies on the website, and the user doesn’t need to view them all at once. Users can only see the ads that are present in their current window.
Thus instead of loading all the ads at the beginning, ads are downloaded at the time when they are visible on the screen of the user.
This reduces the time of loading the website as the data for ads is not downloaded while the website loads.
Browser Cache
When it is the first visit to a website, it downloads lots of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that contain the website’s code. If the browser visits the website frequently, the browser will need to download these files every time.
Browser caching allows a browser to store some of these files at the user’s end. This reduces the amount of data needed to be downloaded in subsequent visits. Thus, when a user visits a certain website next time, it won’t take much longer to load. So you can make your website faster by allowing browser cache to be stored.
Distributing Content Over Pages
Another trick to a faster website is to reduce the website content displayed on a single web page. If the content of a web page is large, it will take more time to be downloaded, and that web page will load slowly. Thus, instead of putting a lot of content on a single web page, you can distribute it among different web pages.
This can be done by reducing the number of elements per page and distributing them over many web pages.
Using Lesser Plugins
To induce functionality and features in a website, a lot of third-party plugins and API plugins are used by developers. Every plugin requires its own set of data to be downloaded. If there are a large number of plugins on your website, they will be downloaded while loading your website. A large number of plugins means a larger volume of data to be downloaded. This will hinder the speed of a website and increase its loading time.
You must reduce the number of plugins by only keeping the necessary ones on your website. This way, you can improve your website’s speed.
Compressing The Webpages
Compressing a web page allows you to reduce the size of your website without losing any quality of your content. Various elements of your webpage include text, media, animations, and different assets that help your website function. All of these can be compressed to reduce the size.
You can improve your website speed by 70% if you compress your website using tools like GZIP. GZIP reduces the size of HTTP requests by compressing different elements of the website.
This makes the website smaller in size and faster to load.
Conclusion
Everybody prefers a faster website. Users think of saving their time by putting websites that load quickly over websites that take even a few more seconds to load. No matter how strong your content is, it is a failure if a user exits your website before it is loaded. Thus, a fast website is important for your site’s performance and maintaining traffic through the website. Thus, the speed of a website is also a very strong factor in its success. You can boost your website by following the optimization and management tips we offer in this article and improve your website’s productivity.