Blog Image
27Sep

Now Speed Up Your Website Loading Smartly!

The fast loading of the website is a must if you want to retain the visitors on your website. You need to understand why it is so important and then take the necessary steps to website speed optimisation.

No visitor prefers long wait for the pages to load in order to see them. This loosens his interests from your website and unfortunately, he quits.

What happens is you lose a visitor! There might not be just one visitor you lose. Your website rank gradually ceases and that’s why you need to take care of your website and it’s pages so that they load quickly and no visitors feel like quitting it!

In order to test your website speed, you can use any of these tools keycdn (Check Now), WebPageTest (Check Now), Developers.google.com (Check Now).


Now once you have tested your Website Loading Speed and if it shows poor performance then you need to work up hard on it. Below, we have mentioned a few techniques which if you follow, can drastically improve the average load time of your website.

1) Minimize HTTP Requests

When you open a webpage in a browser, it sends an HTTP request to the web server and asks for the page URL. As soon as it gets the URL in HTML it again asks for additional requests regarding the images, CSS, scripts, Flash any many more.  The number of time it sees any additional element it sends a new HTTP request. Hence it takes much longer time then required making your website to load slowly.

But you can overcome this by simplifying your design through following tricks.

 

2) Reduce Server Response Time

Server Response Time is the time the server takes to respond to a request. It is one of the major component that needs to be taken care off!

There are 3 main factors which affect the Server Response Time and these are: Database, Traffic and Hosting, and Resource Usage.

Databases

One needs to optimise the database in order to reduce the server response time. Database optimisation is nothing but a variety of strategies involved to achieve this result. The construction of queries in a proper way gives you faster results. For this you can use appropriate indexes, you can even change its structure/schema, or use external caches. You need to organise the structure of your database in such a way that it maximizes the speed and efficiency with which data is retrieved.

Traffic and Hosting

As the number of users increase on your website, more is the bandwidth you will need in order to pass the traffic from it. Hence, then is the time you need to upgrade your hosting package.

Read More about “Popularly Used Types of Web Hosting” and choose the one suitable as per your requirement.

More the Traffic = Higher the Bandwidth needed

There a number of options available for selecting the type of web hosting. You can choose it as per your requirement.

Proper Resource Usage

The proper usage of resources is very necessary. Few of its techniques are mentioned below:

  • Add the CSS files at the top of the page and Javascript at the bottom.
  • Enable the Gzip compression.
  • Procrastinate the not so important resources.
  • For small styling and scripts, try to include them in HTML itself.

3) Optimise the Images

Things you must keep in mind while image optimisation are:

  • Proper naming of the images: Creative appropriate descriptive name for the images is necessary although it may not seem that but for SEO purpose It indeed is. Search engines search for keywords in not only your webpage but, also in the filenames of the images.
  • Always mention ALT tags: It is advised to never miss writing any alt tag for any image in your website. When the browser fails to display the image in a webpage, alt tags are the alternative text that lets you know what that image is about. Alt tags are also used by SEO purposes.
  • Size does matter! : It is recommended that you use the images as small as possible. You can crop it manually or you can even optimise it online over here (http://optimizilla.com/).
  • Choose the right image format: JPEG tends to be your right option as it not only provides small size image but also with good quality. Whereas, GIFs are preferred if you are willing to show some animated stuff on your wepage. On the other hand, PNG format files provide better results than GIFs in form of quality (colors) but, are indeed of very large size. So, it’s better to go for JPEG format if your only purpose is to show simple images/pictures in your webpage.

4) Reduce CSS and Javascript

Many times, your webpage has unnecessary lines of codes which causes the server to take more time than usual to send the webpage when requested. All you can do is to remove those unnecessary codes such as white spaces, comments, new line character, etc.

You can reduce the CSS page online by using the tool cssminifier.
For HTML you can use minifycode .
And for Javascript you can use javascript-minifier

5) Try 307 instead of 301 Redirects

In 301 redirects responses are cached which leads to slower loading of the page. If you want to permanently redirect the URL to another page then you must try 307 redirect instead of 301 as 307 redirects never caches the responses which leads to quicker loading of webpages.

6) Caching

Caching increases the website performance. It stores the frequently accessed data or the expensive data in the memory. The next time user wants to access the same data it reuses the saved one instead of recreating the HTTP request.

For cache, there are 2 types of it:

Browser Cache

As the name suggests, caching is done in the browser so that it doesn’t have to request the serer for the webpage again and again. You can have the cache set up to 7 days max in general but for ads or widgets specially it is advisable to keep it for 1 day only so that if there are any changes in the original webpage, you are being showed the new/latest webpage and not the old one. If you are being showed the old webpage instead of the new one due to the time limit you set as 7 days, you manual clear out/ flush the cache from your browser.

Server Cache

Server cache is the cache stored at the server side. On the HTTP request, the server sends the same webpage the last time it sent. It saves it’s time but the bandwidth is still not reduced. If your webpages have frequent changes then you are advised to use server cache. But, in case of long future change requirements you can even use CDN (Content Delivery Network). For better optimization results you can even use both cache and CDN altogether. Learn More on CDN here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network).

Having trouble with caches? We can help you. Reach us @ F5 Buddy

7) Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site

Installing too any plugins in your website may lead to slower its speed. It is advisable to install only those plugins which are genuinely necessary. If your site is running slow you can do a plugin check. Disable all the plugins one by one and keep checking the website speed on keycdn, WebPageTest, Developers.google.com as explained in the beginning of this article. If the speed of your website increases after disabling any particular plugin, then you know what the root cause is and you can take necessary actions then.

8) Fix 404 Errors

404 errors require your constant monitoring. If there is any 404 error found in your website you need to correct is ASAP.

Following are some ways you can do so:

  • Simply correct the source link!

If there is any broken link which leads to the 404 error, correct it if possible.

  • Restoring the deleted pages

If you have deleted some pages of our website and the visitors are still trying to search them, in that case you need to quickly restore those pages to avoid the 404 error.

© Copyright 2024 F5 Buddy Pvt. Ltd.. All Rights Reserved