Tips to Optimize the Speed of Your Website
Website speed optimization is just one of many things you can do to make your website more appealing to users. 40% of users will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, with 7% more abandoning it for each additional second. Having a fast loading site helps increase traffic and retain users for longer. Given how crucial speed is on the internet, how can you make website faster?
In order to optimize the speed of a website, individuals need to maintain their sites. The process of website maintenance can provide the mechanisms to monitor speed, which can prevent performance issues in the future. Remember that a website that has become outdated can cause friction in the user experience, resulting in customers taking their business elsewhere.
Anyway, besides the above-mentioned tip, below-mentioned are a few more points that can help you to optimize the speed of your website.
Enable Caching
Certain elements on a webpage are downloaded to a user’s computer the first time they visit a site, speeding up the time it takes to display those same elements on every return visit. This is known as caching and is one of the best tools you can use for website speed optimization. While it is crucial to have a website that loads quickly to begin with, being able to decrease wait time is the key to getting users to come back. Setting a cache time for a week or less for various resources can improve your site’s efficiency spectacularly.
Consolidate Resources
The biggest slowdown for most websites is extraneous code and images. The more complex a webpage is, the longer it will take to load. Naturally, the key to optimization and creating a fast loading site is to simplify where you can. Combining code into a single script is useful in this regard, as it requires less time to fulfill a single larger request as opposed to numerous smaller ones.
This advice can work for images, too. Each image on your site requires multiple server requests in order for it to display properly. By combining your CSS files into a sprite, you consolidate all the images you feature into a single background image. By doing this, it requires less effort to secure the resources to display your images from the server.
Compress Where Possible
Compression is a form of data storage that allows a user to create a new, smaller file representing the data contained in larger files. By doing this, you can substantially decrease the amount of resources needed to load files on your webpage. Many popular web servers can do this by using a program like Gzip when working with certain types of code, such as HTML, but it is still helpful to format your code in the best way possible to assist this process. Keep things like capitalization, tag attribute quotes, and casing consistent across your code. Try to minimize the amount of spacing and unnecessary line breaks whenever possible, and keep your code ordered in an easy to follow way.
Optimizing the Speed of Your Website
Now that you’ve got the basics down, you should be well on your way to optimizing the speed of your website. There are many other tips and tricks out there to explore as well as many things to learn through trial and error. Build on what you know to make website faster.