Speeding up your website is a must for two different reasons! One-reducing the time that’s needed for your website to be loaded is crucial for your SEO. And two, page speed is especially important for your customers, and for sure you want your customers to be happy! By some researches, almost every visitor expects that a website should load in no more than 2 seconds. And half of them will abandon a page that takes 3 or more seconds to be loading. So we’ve chosen six tips that can help you reduce your website loading time.
Optimize Your Images
If you’re using too many images on your site, this will surely increase loading time because usually, images take up the most space. Especially high-resolution images because they’re heavier. Therefore, you should always optimize your images. And here are two techniques to do that- you can scale them or compress them.
- Scale your images, before you upload them on your site, not after that. Because if you upload them with their full size and then scale them using CSS, the web browser will still load the full size.
- Compress your images. One way to compress your images is by using a WordPress plugin for image compression. Also, you can do this by using some online tools like Tiny png. The good thing about this method is that you can reduce the size of the images without compromising their quality.
Minify Your Code
When it comes to your code you should combine all your CSS files in one large CSS file. In this way, you can eliminate the necessity for the browser to retrieve multiple files, and by this, the number of HTTP requests will decrease. The same rule applies to JavaScript files. Furthermore, you should remove all extra spaces and line breaks, because every unnecessary element adds a little bit of heaviness to the site.
Compress Files and Put CSS at the Top and Javascript at the Bottom
In addition to minifying the code, you can also compress the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files by using some online tools like gzip. In this way, you’ll reduce the size of these files, and page loading time accordingly. Also, a good practice is to put your stylesheets in the head tag and scripts at the bottom of the HTML document.
Use Browser Caching
By enabling browser caching you can store some data on your visitors’ computer in temporary storage. Therefore, when they come back to your site the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page. If your website is in WordPress, there are many plugins that you can use for this purpose.
Limit the Number of Plugins
If you’re using too many plugins, this can surely slow down your site, so you should consider reducing them. For speeding up your website you should delete all the plugins that you don’t use, and maybe some of the plugins that you’re using but aren’t crucial.
Use CDN
Surely, all of your visitors can’t be near your servers, so using a CDN is a smart choice. CDN or Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers that helps in improving the process of delivering content to users. In other words, your website content is stored on multiple servers that are distributed at different locations. Therefore, when a visitor comes to your website the content will be accessed from the nearest server. In this way, the time that is needed for a browser to access the content will be reduced, and thus the loading time will be decreased.
You can apply only some of the tips above, but for best results, you should make a combination from all of the six tips for speeding your website. Because like we’ve mentioned in the beginning, your customers’ happiness should be beyond everything.
