In one of our earlier blogs, we mentioned why it is very important to have a fast loading website. In the following write-up, we will help you understand how you can optimize your website’s page loading speed.

The average website loading speed has increased by 22% while the minimum average attention span of the visitor is only 2 or 3 seconds.

While optimizing your page speed to give your users the user experience, please do remember to make a backup file of your site before getting started.

Server

Listed below are a few factors that come together to influence the Server response time.

Website traffic

You may have come across the situation where you visit a restaurant for a meal and you have to wait for the table because all tables are occupied by the people who showed up earlier. You will have to wait a little longer to get the table. Just like the busy restaurants that can serve limited number of people at a time, servers have a similar limitation where the website loading speed reduces if the traffic on the website is more.

Website resource usage

The website performance and the functionality add up to heavy sever usage. The word press theme loads images, style sheets, scripts etc. every time some uses the website. The web server is used several times when you have users visiting your website. This usage adds up to decreasing the server speed.

This can be sorted by reducing the resources per page. The webmaster should be daft enough to use the resources smartly can improve the server capacity by large amounts. Optimising the Resource usage will facilitate to serve more visitors. Because the server load is reduced, it will help the website respond quickly.

It is advisable to reduce the CSS, Javascript, etc. while developing your website. Lighter is your Code, less stress it has on your server.

The CSS files can be minified into single file or can be distributes to various other locations. Likewise, locate all your Javascript files in HYML or in a combined external file. When they are placed separately, it creates an external call for the server to run when the website loads every time.

Enable “Keep alive”

HTTP keep alive will help you reduce the subsequent requests for latent TCP connections. The Keep-alive feature is mostly an additional feature and you may have to have a word with the hosting company to enable the feature.

Web hosting

It is important to upgrade the hosting space once the websites start generating the traffic. Do not stretch the resources you have too thin.

Get a specific hosting space for your website. The hosting space which is tool specific will optimize for the inherent problems that arise with the dynamic content and with the tools like WordPress, Joomla, etc. 

Cacheable redirects

several web pages particularly the mobile pages, redirect to a different URL. A mobile website will have the URL as m.xyz.com for the website www.xyz.com. By making this redirect cacheable, the user’s browser can speed up the loading time for the repeated visitors.

Similarly, the 302 redirects should be temporary and serve as “recall this link later”. 301 should be the permanent redirect as it is best way to cache the redirects.

Content delivery networks

The content delivery networks address the major problem of the websites particularly for the users who visit the sites from far the distant locations. The CDN reduces the time the host server requires to receive process and deliver the complete information on the request for the page source. The time consumed by the host server to respond to the request for the page source like images, CSS files, etc. is called latency.

The CDN servers address the latency issue which largely depends on the distance between the server and the user who is trying to access the website. The latency is worse for a website with several number of resources.

Suppose, you built a website with all its resources hosted in Delhi, India. If a visitor from the Chicago in the USA is clicking on your website, then each request has to go to a trip to Delhi in India, then to Chicago of the USA.

Assume that your website has 150 objects. The user browser will have to make 150 requests to your server in order to retrieve those objects. Ideally, the latency should be somewhere between 75- 140 ms. But for mobile users, the latency score can be higher for the mobile users. It may add another couple of seconds.

Remember, this is only one factor. There are several others which influence your website speed. When you put them together, the page load speed will increase significantly.

2. Images

Image dimensions

When you specify the size of the image on your web page, it helps the server to wrap around them. It is same for the non-replaceable elements like applets, embedded documents, etc. If the image dimensions are not specified, the browser will reload to display the images.

Optimizing images

Some websites display the other elements before showing the images. This is because the images on the website are not optimised.

Fast internet is not something that you can take for granted. There are many who are using the internet for the first time in India where the connections are not lightning speed. The images often contain additional comments and colours which increase their size. Reducing the image size will improve the website speed.

It is ideal to save the images in JPEG format.

3. Codes and content elements

Compress your codes

Gzip is a file compressing software used to reduce the size of the codes encrypted in CSS, HTML and Javascript files. It is important to reduce the size of files that are larger than 150 bytes to enable the quick loading of the website.

Minify CSS,

It is not often that a client would be okay with the website in a single go. There will be several changes. According to these changes, your programming team will end up compiling lengthy codes, which requires a lot of space. However lighter your code is, it has to be minified to decrease the weight on the server and enable the website to load faster.

The above mentioned factors will improve your website speed significantly. Try them and let us know what you think.

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