How Can We Make Our Website Faster?
According to findings, about 53% of regular mobile website visitors will choose to leave a page if loading requires more than three seconds. Slow websites can cause people to become impatient while waiting for a page to load fully, thereby making the website rank lower in search engine rankings. This means fewer page views and, as a result, less advertising revenue or customer conversion for you.
It also degrades the overall user experience and provides insufficient incentive for them to return. On the other hand, fast websites can provide users with the information they seek more quickly and accurately. Read on to learn more about making a website faster.
Common Tricks for Making Your Website Faster
Compress and Optimize Your Pictures
Images help to improve the appearance of your web pages and the quality of your content. However, large images can cause loading times to be delayed.
Therefore, one of the effective ways to add page loading speeds is to compress and enhance your images. This includes switching file formats and compressing images with lossy or lossless compression.
You can reduce the ‘weight’ of your images by reducing their file sizes, which will help your pages load faster.
Use Caches To Your Benefit
Page caching occurs when web pages store static files (such as HTML documents and images), allowing visitors to access that page more quickly because the database does not have to retrieve each file each time a request is made.
The problem with caching is that it usually only works for repeat visitors. Because the page needs to load files at least once before it stores them, first-time site visitors will not have the site cached yet.
Web Host
Examining your web server is one of the simplest ways to speed up your website. You may consider switching from a shared hosting plan for better results. Traditional “shared hosting” places websites on a physical server where all resources are shared (often unequally) among them. On the other hand, dedicated cloud hosting provides virtually limitless resources for all applications. Furthermore, a dedicated server gives users more control over how they customize their servers and install the necessary software.
Compress Your Data
You can significantly compress your data to enhance your website’s efficiency. Well-known web servers, like IIS and Apache, make use of the GZIP algorithm to automatically compress CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
For JavaScript and CSS files, Use Asynchronous and Deferred Loading.
JavaScript and CSS files make up your website. These scripts can be loaded in either synchronous or asynchronous mode. Synchronous means the files are loaded one at a time, in the order they appear on your website. When the browser encounters a script using this method, it will stop loading other elements on the page until that file has been fully loaded. Asynchronous loading, on the other hand, permits multiple files to load at the same time, which can improve page performance. Setting this up entails removing render-blocking resources.
Set the Expire Header
There is usually an expiration date to be found in the header for all types of cache, deciding the length of time for which the files can be stored on the visitor’s computer and the servers. Everything expires immediately when the default is set to zero seconds. Images (jpg) are set to expire after one week. Increase the “expires header” value for static files like images to whatever value you want. The expiry date for dynamic data you frequently update should be zero seconds.
Make Use of a Content Delivery Network
A CDN (Content Delivery Network), also known as a ‘content distribution network,’ is a network of servers that can support the speed of page loading. It accomplishes this by hosting and delivering static content copies from servers worldwide
A CDN works alongside your host rather than in place of it. Aside from the server hosting your primary website, you can use a CDN to allocate copies of your site’s files across numerous data centers. This can improve performance by shortening the distance that data requests must travel between browsers and your host’s server. In addition, a CDN helps to reduce network latency, just as it offers lower TTFBs by loading web page content from servers close to every visitor.
Ready To Make Your Website Faster?
Everyone appreciates visually appealing and well-designed websites. However, if that means waiting a few extra seconds for the website to load, we will almost certainly lose some visitors. So, whatever we do, let’s not sacrifice speed for appearances.
It is possible to have both! You just need to work on improving your website. Contact us at Unbound Digital for help.