How to Enhance Your Website for Speed
Website owners need to know how to enhance your website for speed. In this post, we will review all of the factors that help you increase website speed, in particular, loading time.
Loading speed is one of the most important factors for creating a successful website. In this fast-moving world, people want things instantly and cannot wait around for a website to load, even though that is only 4 seconds.
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Why is speed important?
The truth is, almost 50% of users expect a good website to load within two seconds and only 10% of all users will wait for the website to load for more than three seconds. In other words, you will be losing traffic with every second in delay, and most of the users will not return to your slow loading website.
Practically, a slow loading website kills conversions and you cannot maintain a good business module if you cannot attract visitors to your website.
That is why it is very important to build a steady website structure optimized for speed that launches as fast as a horse runs on Kentucky Derby.
How to Enhance Your Website for Speed
Speed has an impact on website visibility and rank
Website performance is one of the main SEO metrics that search engines like Google uses in order to determine the quality of the website and rank. This means that speed will have a huge impact on your organic traffic as it influences how users are going to find it on search engines.
Since most people use mobile devices, Google also started its mobile-first index, which puts the accent on the mobile versions of your website. This also means that your website must be responsive to any device and load as fast as it can.
What is a good website loading time?
Beginners usually do not know what the benchmark for good loading speed is and do not know what to aim for. If you are creating your first website, you should try to optimize everything for speed by creating a simple and minimalistic design with only the necessary functions.
Most of the websites on the internet have high average landing page loading speed which is from 8 to 9 seconds, but all of them lose half of the traffic they can possibly get.
The best loading speed to aim at is from 1s to 3s, but you have to work hard to reach that goal.
How to improve website performance and loading speed?
There are many different ways to improve website loading speed, and different factors are responsible for poor website performance. We will highlight some of the main things you need to do in order to make your website load quicker. Keep in mind that there are many things you can do, but that does not necessarily mean that you need to do all of them. It depends on your website and you just need to find the right one that works for you.
Combine files and Minify in order to reduce requests
Every time someone opens your website, there are many requests that travel back and forward from your server to the final preview. The more requests your website has, the slower it gets. Well, a structured website with a well-developed code does not repeat requests.
Requests are very important just because they determine your website appearance. So, in order to reduce the number of requests, you should start off by creating a simple design. A high number of requests is usually a problem for template websites, where you can easily get not well-developed code that repeats its requests.
You can start with your JavaScript files, HTML and CSS. You can minify or combine files which reduce the number of requests, the size of each file as well as the number of files. Basically, by minifying, you can remove any unnecessary codes, as well as extra spaces or line brakes which will make the process smoother.
Decrease the number of HTTP demands
The website quickness varies on the number of files and distinct parts of the website that are downloading every time users access it. This implies that in order to show your website outline, an HTTP request is made for each component of your website.
The more elements you add to your website, the lengthier it will take to render the final preview. Your subsequent move should be to lessen your HTTP requests and find out which is the minimum you can have in order for your website to behave appropriately.
Try deferring JavaScript files loading
In order to improve website performance, you must think smart. You can create a layout that does not load larger files such as JavaScript until the full content is loaded without a delay. This way you can trick your website to show its initial features and afterward load any larger files.
You can do this by adding an external code before your body tag for HTML websites or install a plugin that will sort things out for you.
Change the loading ways of JavaScript and CSS files
It is important to know that files can load in different ways such as asynchronously and synchronously. Most of the websites have synchronously loading where files load one by one as they appear on the page. By using asynchronous loading you will allow your website to load some of them at the same time in which case you can get a faster response.
There is also the problem with the delay, just because with synchronously loading, your website will not load more files until it is done loading the first one it started, which is not the case with asynchronous loading.
Minimize server response time
DNS providers have a huge impact on website loading speed. Whenever a user visits your website, the DNS server is responsible for translating your website URL into an IP address that resembles your location online. After that, your network host transfers that request into your web server.
In order to get a much faster response time, you have to upgrade your DNS provider and search for one that provides higher speeds.
These are some of the ways you can improve your website performance. As we mentioned earlier, there are many things you can change just so you have a better performing website, but you should not try all things at once. Choose the right one for your website type and make your loading speed blisteringly fast.