The Internet is not that far different from the real world. In both worlds, speed is everything. But what differs the Internet form the real world is that in the internet, customers are won or lost in just a fraction of a second.
The worst case here is that there are website owners who misconstrue slow page load as the result of slow internet connection. But what they don’t know is that culprit behind the slow page load is the website itself.
DO FEW SECONDS hurt?
A BIG YES FOR THAT.
Page load time can greatly affect your user experience and your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers or into leads.
A one-second delay in page load time yields:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
A few extra seconds could have a huge impact on your website performance and the ability to engage visitors and make sales. It’s an undeniable fact that high performing websites have higher SEO ranking which in result brings in more visitors and higher conversion rate. Website speed is one of the factors that is used in many search engine in their ranking algorithm.
To help you achieve and maintain a high performing website, we have here 9 ways on you can make an improvement to your site. Please read on!
1. Code better For Better Performance
Try writing cleaner code. Do so by reducing the lines of coding as much as you can, optimizing database queries, using design patterns, and avoiding recursion. Structured and readable code always pays off. It increases the maintainability of your website and decreases HTTP overload, all of which will greatly enhance your website performance.
2. Minify resources
“Minify” is a verb from programming term that means removing unnecessary code from a CSS or JavaScript file. Minifying code is an excellent way to improve web page performance. It helps speed up your page loading, making visitors and search engines happy.
Minify your code by removing:
- Whitespace characters
- New line characters
- Comments
- Block delimiters
These types of characters help make the code readable but they are not necessary for the code to execute properly.
3.Reduce image size
Words can be powerful, but picture creates greater impact. And that’s why websites are heavily dependent on graphics but If your images are not compressed, it will slow down your website’s performance.
The higher resolution the image has, the larger its file size is. Large sizes images can slow down your website’s page speed. This hurts your users’ experience and, eventually, your search engine ranking.
So how to maintain a high website performance without taking down those images?
OPTIMIZE THOSE IMAGES
Image optimization is the process of reducing the file size of your images as much as possible but still maintaining a good quality so that your page load times remain low.
To make it short, optimizing images means saving your image in a web-friendly format.
Here’s how to optimize images for the web:
- Name your images simply and appropriately.
- Optimize your alt attributes carefully.
- Reduce the file size of your images.
- Choose the right file type.
- Optimize your thumbnails.
4.Code your site for mobile-first quality and speed
Making your website mobile-friendly is no longer optional. In fact, Google consider “mobile-friendly website” as one of the factors in ranking websites and punishes websites that aren’t optimized for smartphones and tablets.
If you’re creating a new website or redesigning an old one to meet the latest Google algorithm updates, the strategy is to code for mobile users first and then progressively enhance the experience for tablets and desktops.
5.Cache as much as possible
CACHE. Does it ring a bell? You’ve probably heard this term before. So, what is Web Caching?
Every browser has a cache which is a place to store local copies of resources such as images, HTML documents, and other elements that make up a web page.
Caching allows the browser to store data such as the logo or a style sheet. When your user revisits or refreshes the web page, they already have many of the items needed to make up the page, improving website performance. Since the data stored in the browser does not have to be downloaded again. This saves server time and makes things altogether faster.
6. Reduce the number of HTTP requests
What is an HTTP request?
HTTP is a request/response protocol that allows the fetching of resources, such as HTML documents.
Web pages consist of many elements that must be downloaded: images, style sheets, scripts, flash, etc. In order to download each of these files, we have sent separate HTTP Requests, wait for a response and only then, can we use certain elements to render the web page. So the more files you have on your website, the more HTTP requests your user’s browser will need to make. The more HTTP requests, the slower the page loads.
How to reduce HTTPS request?
Read this blog: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/reduce-http-requests
7.Optimize CSS and JavaScript
Writing clean and well-structured CSS code is a big deal when it comes to website performance. A poorly written CSS will increase page loading time which leads to an poor user experience.
Read this blog SAFE PRACTICES FOR PERFECT CSS 2018
JavaScript is every front-end developers best friend when it comes to creating interactive, functionality-rich websites and fast, seamless web applications Same with CSS, JavaScript should be written with caution. A poorly written or complex JavaScript can negatively affect website performance.
Third Party Javascript
Most websites today are very dependent on with third-party plugins or features: social media, chat features, commenting services, information feeds, and others. Though this adds useful features to your site, it could also be your downfall when it comes to your website performance.
How to avoid this? The technique is to load the third party JavaScripts asynchronously. Doing so won’t affect your entire website in the event when third-party crashes. Async loading can also speed up page loads.
8.Enable Gzip compression
One of the fastest ways to increase page loading speed is to use Gzip compression.
“Gzip is a method of compressing files or making them smaller for faster network transfers.”
When someone enters your site, a request is sent to your server to deliver the requested file. The larger these files are, the longer it will take to load. By compressing your web pages and CSS before sending them over to the browser will reduce the loading time of your website.
Gzip compression is a great help in web development because HTML, CSS files use a lot of repeated text and spaces. We recommend enabling Gzip compression as a standard practice because it can reduce page size by up to 70%.
9.YOUR HOSTING
If you did everything mentioned above yet still struggling on your web performance, then try checking your hosting provider. Web hosting is often overlooked as one of the culprits of a slow page load.
What Makes Website Hosting a Vital Factor?
Every time you browses through a site and tries to load a page, you are necessarily running programs and accessing files from the web server (a remote computer). If that web server is fast enough, the web page that you are trying to access will also load quickly.
SHARED AND DEDICATED HOSTING
In a shared hosting, you are sharing a server with other companies. The more websites sharing on the same server, the slower the website speed will be. Hosting companies even made known the downfall of shared hosting. For a higher website performance, consider upgrading to dedicated plan where you have sole access to the server.
Upgrading your hosting plan can have a positive impact on your website’s page load speed.
Creating a website is easy, but if you want to reach the top online, be prepared to do a lot of hard work.
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info@go4globaldesign.com
Northridge, CA 91324
