Regardless of their niche or industry, every organization today wants their website to provide a fantastic user experience. For a website to delight returning users or attract new ones, it must perform better than its competitors. Your website's load speed becomes less important as your customers continue to grow.
Website Speed - What Does It Mean?
A website's speed is often described as its "load time," or how long it takes for the content to fully load. Additionally, it is called "time to first byte," or how long it takes for the website to send the first byte of data to your browser. With Google Insights, you can check the speed of your website.
Speed Up Your Website With These Simple Tips
By speeding up your website, you can gain a significant advantage over competitors with slow loading times. In general, you should aim for your web pages to load within three seconds or less. When a website takes longer than three seconds to load, 40 percent of traffic will abandon it. It is important to have a fast loading time in order to grow your business.
You can speed up your website by following this guide. These factors can definitely ensure a faster loading time for your website. If you intend to make any changes to your site, please read it carefully first.
Keep HTTP requests to a minimum
In addition to stylesheets, scripts, and images, HTTP requests are generated for every element of your website.
According to research, the downloading elements of a web page account for 80 percent of site loading time. You will have more HTTP requests if you have many of these components on your site.
You can easily identify how many requests your site is currently making using the developer tools settings. As a result, you can take some necessary steps to lower that number. Keeping your website's design simple and clutter-free is essential.
Redirects that are unnecessary must also be removed. Since these redirects are mostly used for fixing broken links, they generate extra HTTP requests, which slow down the website.
Speed up the time to first byte (TTFB)
The TTFB refers to the time that web browsers need to wait before receiving information from the server. Basically, it tells you how long it takes to load a web page.
There are three factors that make up the TTFB:
- Time to respond
- Timing for processing requests
- Request time for HTTP
Fast TTFB allows your site's requests to be transferred to the browser more quickly. As a result, your content will load more quickly for your visitors. TTFB must be less than 200ms.
TTFB is often slow for the following reasons:
- A website's traffic
- The creation of content
- Problems related to the network
- Setting up the server
Enabling your web browser's cache will lower your TTFB.
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.
File compression and combining
It is possible for every file on your website to increase the loading time. The loading time will increase if there is a lot of data on your site.
It is impossible to remove everything. Minifying and combining them is therefore necessary. The following can be done:
- Fonts from Google
- The JavaScript files
- The CSS files
- The HTML files
The minification process eliminates unnecessary characters, such as white space and formatting, from your files. Everything that is not necessary for the code to function will be automatically removed. In the end, you will be able to reduce the size of your files.
It is possible to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining the files into small groups. The download of six small files is faster than the download of one big file, for instance.
Asynchronous loading is recommended
After combining and minifying your JavaScript and CSS files, they must be optimized. Two options are available to you:
- Loading asynchronously
- Loading in synchrony
Depending on their location on the web page, files that are loading synchronously will load one at a time. Generally, if one file takes a long time to load, other files won't load until that file is fully loaded.
Files can be loaded simultaneously in asynchronous loading. You can load other elements of your page without delay if any file is taking longer to load.
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver content
Websites are loaded on servers, as everyone knows. The server that hosts your website receives a request from someone visiting your site. Users will experience slower loading times on your site if you have high traffic levels.
An increase in web traffic is a great thing for a website. Visitors abandoning your site due to slow loading speed is the last thing you want.
Several networks of global servers cache your website with CDNs. The closest server to the physical location will automatically route your site's download requests to the closest server.
What you can do to speed up the performance of your mobile website
An eleven percent decrease in page views, a seven percent loss in conversions, and a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction is caused by a one second delay in page loading. You should improve your mobile website's performance for this reason.
If you want to speed up the performance of your mobile site, here are some things you can do:
Optimize Server Response Times and Measure Them
In addition to web coding, mobile web page speed is determined by your server. Your web page load time will increase as your server takes longer to respond. Within 200ms of receiving a request, your server should begin transmitting the first byte.
The response time of your server is also called the "time to first byte" or "waiting time." You can decrease your server's response time by following these three procedures:
- Your web pages will require fewer resources.
- Your web server's configuration or software should be improved.
- Maintain adequate memory and CPU resources for your web hosting service.
- Optimize mobile page speed by minimizing redirects or avoiding them
A redirect is an instruction that takes the visitor from one website to another automatically. The loading time of a page is slowed down by several milliseconds for each redirect. Due to their reliance on less reliable networks, mobile devices are more likely to experience this issue.
Calculate the round-trip time
Data is transmitted from a mobile or desktop device to a remote computer via RTT (round-trip time). A particular address can be pinged to measure it. Several factors determine RTT, such as the number of requests the server handles, the amount of traffic, the number of nodes between them, and the connection medium.
By removing excess weight, sequential round trips can be reduced by ensuring that resources are transmitted in parallel.
Make HTML files JavaScript-friendly and CSS-friendly
It allows you to add interactivity to your web pages and prevents parallel downloads. Web browsers won't start other downloads while loading script code. JavaScripts should be placed at the bottom of the web page to speed up the page load. This will allow HTML content to display before scripts are loaded.
Your Web page should display HTML elements according to CSS. As soon as it is displayed, the content will be displayed by the web browser.
Summary
It is never a good idea to overlook the importance of Website speed. Whether your website grows or fails depends on how fast it loads. The article will explain why it is essential, as well as what you should do to increase the website's speed.