We live in a fast paced world today. That’s why, when people visit your site, it’s important that the pages load fast. We give you 5 tips on how to boost your website speed. It’s necessary that we don’t confuse ‘page speed’ with the ‘site speed.’ Site speed refers to the speed in which the entire website loads when you click on it or the average ‘page speed’ of a site. ‘Page speed’ is actually the time consumed to display a page, or the page load time. It has another definition in other terms. The time the browser needs to receive the first byte of information from the web server is also called page speed.
We now give you the tips.
- It’s Important that You Optimize the Images
It’s important that you make sure that the images on your website aren’t unnecessarily large. They should also be in the appropriate file format. If the number of colors is less than 16, we suggest PNG files. Again, for photographs, JPEGs are better. It is important that you use CSS sprites and form a template of frequently used images on your website like icons and buttons. CSS forms a large image after combining other images. It also translates into fewer HTTP requests. It means that visitors to your site don’t need to wait too long for multiple images to load. Also, make sure that the images are compressed for the web.
- Please Use a Content Distribution Network
This is a process of storing many copies of your website in data centers of different geographical locations. This gives visitors to your site more dependable and faster reach to your site. The process of content distribution networks (CDNs) or a content delivery network therefore involves the distribution of the work of content delivery through separate networks of servers.
- Please Take Advantage of Browser Caching
We recommend that you use tools like YSlow to check if there’s any expiry date for your website cache. You should then set the duration of the information you want to keep cached on the ‘expires’ header. A year is enough time to keep cached information if your website doesn’t have frequent design changes. Why does a browser cache a lot of information? It’s to make sure that when visitors who come back to your site there’s no need to reload the entire page.
- Avoid Landing Page Redirects
Each redirect generates a new HTTP request-response cycle delaying the display of the page. These are in the form of methods or instructions that take a visitor to a certain file to a separate file or location. There may be occasions when a visitor is redirected to www.example.com after typing example.com and then again to “https:www.example.com”.The solution is to ensure that a visitor is redirected to https://www from non www instead of non www to www. If you are not such expert then you may take WP speed optimization services that will take care of entire site optimization work.
- Enabling Compression
Try reducing the size of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files larger than 150 bytes using the software Gzip. It’s a software application that enables file compression. However, don’t use Gzip for image files. That way you’ll be compromising on the quality of the images. You should compress the files in programs like Photoshop.
Conclusion
We hope our 5 tips on how to boost your website speed help enhance the performance of your site. Do let us know how much they’ve helped. We look forwards to hear from you.
