8 Tactics for Better Hands on Website Speed Optimization
A website plays an important role in making a business successful but its loading speed is more significant than the website itself. Speed up website loading time to let your website yield more conversions and make you stand out from your competitors. Today, we will introduce you to a few tactics to improve your Website Speed Optimization process.
We all live in a fast-paced world and people are looking for instant regalement. So when a user visits your website to learn more about your business, the user expects to have a fleet, responsive and seamless experience using your website, failing to do so will force the user to leave your website in search for another.
Importance of Website Load Time Optimization
Website Speed and Performance Optimization is responsible to quickly let you display your online presence to the users. Implementing website speed optimization along with SEO services leaves a positive mark of your website on search engines.
Here are few stats speaking about the importance:
- 1 second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.
- 1 second delay eats away 7% of the coveted conversion rate.
- 47% of consumers expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds to load.
- 75% users won’t return to a page that takes more than 4 seconds to load.
Time to meet the 8 magic tactics:
1. Compress Images
2. Use Content Delivery Network
3. Fix Broken Links
4. Cleaning The Database
5. Enable Keep Alive
6. Enable Browser Caching
7. Use Lightweight Theme
8. Just Gzip
1.Compress Images
“A picture is worth a Thousand Words”
Posting images on your website engages the user to explore more of what you have to offer. However, the sizes of the images tend to be heavy in size and can decrease the loading speed.
If you are using Word Press, there is a plug-in called WP Smush.it which automatically compresses the images without losing any quality. The best part of this plug-in is that it runs in the background every time you upload a new image and you can run it retrospectively for your previous uploaded images as well. ImageOptim, FileOptimizer and Trimage are also good tools to optimize images.
2.Use Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Network or CDN is a set of web servers scattered across the web world based on geographical locations to provide web content to users according to their locations.
For example: if a user from a country, different from yours, visits your site, he/she will access and download files from the closest server.
This lets the user experience minimal lag and faster loading time. Without CDN, all user requests are sent to the same hardware and load time increases when users are from the server.
3.Fix Broken Links
Broken links on your website can drain your bandwidth and result in decreased website speed. It also acts as a turn off for a user visiting your website, forcing them to switch to another competitor’s optimized website.
You can use below mentioned free tools to identify broken links:
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs
- Google Webmaster Tools
Once the broken links have been identified and fixed, it will improve page speed, average pages visited per user and will also trigger decrease in the bounce rate.
4.Cleaning The Database
While using the Content Management System such as Word Press, its complex plug-ins and drafts such as blog posts, comments, and other information increases database size which ultimately pushes your website to work slower.
You should consider WP-Optimize for Word Press Speed Optimization as every CMS is different from the other and requires special techniques for the optimization process.
5.Enable Keep Alive
Keep-alive is a method to help web pages in faster loading by allowing the same TCP connection for HTTP conversation instead of opening a new one with each new request. In short, it is a connection criterion between a web server and a browser.
By enabling Keep-Alive, it allows the user’s machine to download multiple files without asking for permission repeatedly. It has great potential to diminish request time. It is a handy technique to boost website performance optimization.
Use the code to enable Keep-Alive by using .htaccess file:
6.Enable Browser Caching
Caching is the practice of storing static files, such as HTML documents, images, CSS, JavaScript files, and media files for smooth and rapid access, so that the database don’t retrieve all files every time there is a new request. Enabling caching plug-ins for website speed optimization can make a significant impact on loading time.
Banking upon the platform your site runs on, there is different plug-ins, for example: Installing Word Press caching plug-ins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache (for websites with high traffic). These caching plug-ins are best to speed up word press website.
7.Use Lightweight Theme
Who don’t like a good looking, colorful and highly interactive theme?
Everybody loves to have website that looks pretty cool. Website theme is the first thing that encounter with the user and it has big effect on site’s load time. A website furnished with a theme formatted out of complex codes will take more time to load. Keep performance as your priority and choose a lightweight theme.
8.Just Gzip
Gzip compression works exactly like compressing files on a desktop as ZIP files. Enabling Gzip can save lot of bandwidth triggering a faster loading time for the website. The process works by compressing your files into a ZIP file; this is faster for the user’s browser to load the files. The browser unzips the file and displays the full content to the user without losing any quality on displayed content.
The code below can be used in .htaccess file to compress text, Java Script, HTML, XML or CSS:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
Another way to manually add Gzip compression for Google Page Speed Optimization is to the add the below code on top of HTTP or PHP page:
Conclusion
Website Speed Optimization is undoubtedly the crucial thing to consider for yielding business success through the web world. Not putting your resources to speed up website loading time is equivalent to letting your competitors getting ahead. Test your website speed, evaluate the outcomes and inject optimization as soon as you can.
Feel free to get in touch with us for any further queries. Our experts will cater solutions to your problems in the most generic way possible