The speed of your website has a direct impact on how many people use it, how much they like it, and how much money you make. Slow websites frustrate users, who often abandon them if they take more than three seconds to load. That’s why every business owner should ensure their site runs as fast as possible. Here are some quick tips for improving the load time of your site:
Minimize HTTP Requests
This is a simple task that can be done in a few ways. One is to combine related CSS and JavaScript files into one file using tools like Webpack, Gulp or Grunt. Another approach is to use CSS sprites, which are images containing multiple icons from a single image file. This will reduce the number of HTTP requests your site needs to make and save bandwidth on your server as well.* Reduce the size of each HTTP request
Reducing the size of each HTTP request isn’t quite as easy as combining resources into one file (see above), but it’s still doable! You can do this by minifying your code (removing unnecessary characters from HTML/CSS/JavaScript) and compressing images with gzip compression
Reduce Server Response Time
- Use a CDN. If you’re not already using one, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) will make your site load faster by serving many of its static assets from the nearest edge location to the user. It’s like having an army of personal web servers at your disposal!
- Use caching. Making resources cacheable means they can be served more efficiently by browsers and CDNs alike, improving performance for users across different geographic regions and devices.
- Leverage browser caching aggressively. One way that you can use browser caching effectively is by leveraging link tags that point to large image sprites instead of individual images within those sprites—if all icons on your website are being requested from one sprite, then only one request will be made instead of thousands upon thousands for each individual icon!
Enable Compression
Compression of your site’s files can be done either by the server or by a plugin. If you have Apache server software, you should enable compression on it. This can be done through configuration options or through the use of plugins such as mod_deflate or mod_gzip.
One thing to note is that there are two types of compression that you should use: GZIP and Deflate. The difference between them is that GZIP compresses more than Deflate but requires more processing power to do so and therefore has a greater CPU cost associated with it.
Optimize Images
Images are one of the most common elements on a website. They can be used for any number of purposes, from product images to user interface elements to logos and headers. As such, it’s important that you optimize them as much as possible.
Here are some tips for optimizing digital photos:
- Use the right file type – If you don’t have an image editor program, then make sure you save your image in the right format before uploading it. The most common formats are JPG (lossy compression) and PNG (lossless). If you do have an editor like Photoshop or GIMP, try saving your photo as a PSD file with layers intact so that it retains its original quality even after being compressed into JPG format by a browser. It might also be helpful to set up a naming convention that lets people quickly identify what kind of files they’re looking at without having to open them up first—for example, “myname_logo-1” instead of just “logo-1.” That way if someone wants another copy or wants one saved at another size/quality level they’ll know exactly where they need to go!
Place Style Rules in the Document Head
- This is an excellent tip to know if you want to ensure that your style rules are loaded before others.
- style rules in the document head are downloaded first by browsers, which means they’re more likely to be used for any elements that appear on the page. In fact, most browsers ignore style rules in the body of a web page if there are conflicting rules in the head (this is known as cascading).
- Alternatively, some developers put all of their content inside another tag like or . This can be useful if you want some text to look different from other text on a page and don’t have time or inclination to write additional CSS rules for it—you just need one small tweak instead of several large ones.
Remove Unnecessary Code
You can speed up your site by removing unnecessary code.
- Remove unused CSS rules.
- Remove unused JavaScript.
- Remove unused HTML tags.
You can use conditional comments to load only the code that is needed by the browser, and use a content delivery network (CDN) to load CSS and JavaScript files dynamically instead of storing them on your server all at once in one file or folder.
Page Redirects
- Use 301 redirects to tell search engines and users that a page has moved. These are the “permanent” redirects and should be used when you’re moving content from one URL to another. This is the preferred method for changing your website’s URL structure, as it tells Google that all of the content on both pages is related, even if they have different URLs.
- Use 302 redirects temporarily redirect a page. These are useful for when you have a temporary change in website structure (like during maintenance), or if you want to move some content around without changing its permanent location in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). A 302 will tell Google that this particular page has been permanently moved, but it won’t update their index with any new information until they crawl your site again after receiving it via a 301 or other type of redirect response code.
- Use 303 permanently redirects permanently redirected pages (after receiving them via a 301 or other type of redirect response code). This is similar to sending a standard 302 response code except that instead of pointing directly towards whatever URL has been requested by someone looking up your domain name from somewhere else online – such as through an image link – this type points back towards itself which means there’s no need for additional requests being made before access can be granted again.”
Conclusion
Hopefully, you now have a better idea of how to optimize site speed. Remember that these tips are not exhaustive and there are many more things you can do to improve the speed of your website. But if you follow the steps outlined above, then I’m sure that your site will be much faster than it was before.
