16
Jul 2019
Handy Tips for Website Performance Optimization
In this booming world of online competition, Website performance optimization plays an important role being the top priority.
Everyone wants the websites to load in fraction of seconds. The users of every website are looking for a faster, easier experience. Overall, the size of the sites are getting bigger and need to be made faster, so the users find it easier to navigate around.
Here are a few reasons that drives you to opt for new website speed optimization techniques:
- Website speed is a part of the google search algorithm
- User experience is one of the key goals of a website and speed optimization is one of its most important aspects
- Slow loading pages suffer from low user engagement have lower chances of getting ranked on search engines.
Here are a few techniques for website speed optimization techniques:
1. COMBINE IMAGES TO CSS
Increase in the number of images on the webpage causes its speed to go down drastically. So, combining all background images into one, using sprites can help in reducing the page-load speed time. The single combined image will be shown as a result of the CSS background-image and background-position properties.
2. Content Delivery Network
Transferring of the static files to the servers, close to those particular users is being done by Content Delivery Network, which helps in loading the web-pages more faster. More and more websites are using CDNs to improve the speed of their website.
3. Gzip Compression
Another way to improve the speed of the website can be done by compressing HTML and CSS files using gzip. This way of compression is an easy and useful way for website speed optimization, which also saves bandwidth by compressing 50-70% of the file size.
4. Minify JavaScript and CSS
Minification helps in removing the unnecessary characters from code execution, thus significantly helping in website speed optimization. This helps in removing comments, block delimiters, new line characters and whitespace characters. These characters hinders the code execution process.
5. Optimize Images
Speed on the site would be reduced by having a large number of heavy images on the webpage. These heavy images can be optimized using image editors which inturn helps in improving the load speed time of the web page.
6. Enable HTTP Keep-Alive Headers
Keep alive allows the same TCP connection for HTTP conversation in place of a new one with each new request. It is a communication between the web server and the web browser. This communication helps to grab more than one file at a time.
7. Page Caching
Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page. This helps in reducing queries and improving the page load speed. Search engines like google store a backup version of the page ensure that the stored page gets served up, taking lesser time.
8. Optimize Plugins and Themes
Unused plugins and themes in your site can slow down the speed of the website. Remove all those unused plugins and themes. Besides that, you also need to remove all the spam comments from your site dashboard and helps it load faster.
9. Remove Pop Up Ads
Too many popups on the page can reduce its load speed. Reducing the popups and ad banners on your web pages, is a useful way to improve the speed of the site.
10. Minimize Redirects
Many times some pages on the website become redundant but are still getting traffic. Redirects are used to transfer this traffic to more relevant pages. Although this is an important SEO practice, too many redirects reduce are a hindrance to website speed optimization and reduce the speed of the website. Basically, when a redirect is processed, time gets wasted in moving the user from one page to another.
11. Server Response Time Optimization
If our website is getting a high amount of traffic, the server response time will automatically go down. We need to check database queries, routing and memory and ensure that everything is in order. This will help in improving the server response time.
12. Reduce HTTP Requests
When your browser fetches data from a server, it uses HTTP protocol.
There are many ways you can reduce the number of requests such as:
i. Inline your JavaScript(only if it is very small)
ii.Using CSS Sprites
iii.Reducing assets such as 3rd party plugins that make a large number of external requests