Nobody likes slow websites. Users become less and less patient to surf the web pages. The Akamai study reported that half of the internet users wait a few seconds or less to load a website. They will abandon the website, if it takes longer than 3 seconds.
Website speed is crucial for online businesses as it directly affects conversion rates. Optimizing the loading speed is a must for SEO value. In this article, you will find the best tips on how to improve your website’s page load speed.
1. Optimize Your Website’s Code
The code is very important for search engines, not for humans. The code should be well-written and well-structured. Try to reduce the lines of coding, use design patterns, prevent recursion and optimize database queries. A cleaner code will increase website performance, diminish HTTP requests and make your site easier to maintain.
Remove undesired code from your CSS, JavaScript and HTML files. Decrease the number of page breaks, line breaks, blank spaces. These elements can be insignificant to you, but they mean a lot to the web browser.
JavaScript is essential to develop functionality-rich websites. Complex and poorly written Javascript can have a bad impact on the overall performance. If you use large JavaScript libraries like JQuery, use the jQuery directly from a CDN.
Sometimes it is ok to use plain HTML code instead of PHP if it is just static content. PHP works through a processor, while HTML is transmitted via browser.
To detect possible errors, you can conduct a website audit using SE Ranking. You can also use some Google tools that help minify these files.
2. Optimize media files
Websites that are slow-loading are often the outcome of using large media files. Based on the HTTP Archive study, images make up around 62% of a total website’s weight. This means that optimizing images is a must if you want to enhance your website’s performance. Optimizing media files means keeping your files in a web-friendly format.
Use the following tips to optimize media files:
- Choose the right file format like PNG, JPEG and GIF for images, and MP4 for video.
- Use images sitemaps, especially if you use Javascript galleries.
- Remove unwanted image data.
- Use videos on Youtube and other video hostings and integrate them into your site.
- Serve your images using a CDN.
- Save your images with the right dimensions.
- Test with quality settings: reduce the file sizes, improve image quality and the level of compression.
- Use photo editing tools like Photoshop or Lightroom.
- Compress and reduce the width of the video with Adobe Premiere.
- Try to make images the same style and size.
3. Reduce HTTP Requests
Having too many server clients is one of the most significant things that affects the websites page loading speed. Yahoo reported that HTTP requests take up around 80% of a webpage’s loading time.
Every single file you have on your website sends a call to the server. If you have 50 images, that’s 50 times the server needs to be called. This means that the more HTTP requests, the longer your site takes to load. To decrease HTTP requests and speed up your website, here are some techniques you can follow:
- Combine CSS and Javascript files. Creating one large file looks better than creating different files to process different tasks.
- Use CSS sprites. CSS image sprites connect a complex of all images on your site into one single image file. It includes background-position to show the required portion of the images.
- Don’t abuse JavaScript. Too much JavaScript can be the reason of HTTP overload and make your site run slow. Try to use JavaScript when required.
- Decrease the number of images. If your website is image-heavy, delete unnecessary files, especially if they are large.
- Find and fix broken links. Every 404 error sent to the server means that it searches for the page, displays a not found message and recalls a custom error. Each such server call can slow down the loading time of the website.
- Include CSS coding instead of images. It is easier for developers to use images, but they slow down the overall website performance. Try to use CSS whenever possible.
Conclusion
Website speed is very important in this fast-paced world. Every second matters. Even 1 second delay in load time can lead to a lower conversion rate. That’s why website performance should be top priority. Take the time to test out your website and see what pages need improvement on their speed performance.
Using the above-mentioned tips can have a good chance to improve your website speed and improve the user experience. If you know other ways how to speed up a website, let me know in the comments below.
