V Network Solution

Best Page Speed Optimization Tips

How to increase website speed? The speed of the website makes the primary impression of your business. It is essential to understand that you will not have a second chance when it comes to the user experience. Slow website speed is one of the most frustrating things that will drive people away from your resource.

With the launch of Google’s AMP project, the controversy on website load time appears to have acquired new ground. Everyone seems to be in a maddening frenzy to optimize their site and reduce page load time.

Why is website speed important?

Because the page load time decides whether a visitor to your site will explore more or separate their paths. In fact, more than 83% of visitors expect a web page to load in 3 seconds or less, and more than 40% of visitors leave a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

In addition to losing traffic and page views, your return on investment and conversions will also be lost if the page is not processed well. Don’t trust our word, check out these statistics:

• A 1 second delay in load time leads to 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.
• 79% of buyers who have issues with website performance say they will never buy it again.
• 44% of site visitors will expand a negative image of the agency if the web site fails or the loading time is poor.
• If an eCommerce website is making $ 100,000 a day, then a second-page delay should cost $ 2. 5 million misplaced in sales each year.
• The conversion rate increases by using 74% whilst the page load time improves from 8 to 2 seconds.

But is it just your ROI and overall conversion that is affected by a slow loading web page?

NO!, A slower page load time also hampers your business’s SEO, user experience, and brand image. Take a look at the statistics that reveal the same.

• 46% of visitors who were unable to access the site due to load times are expected to tell the same to friends.
• 44% of visitors will develop a negative picture of the organization if the website fails or the loading time is poor.
• Site speed is an important factor that Google uses to determine search rankings, on both desktop and mobile devices.
• According to the Google page speed test a key element of your landing page experience and has a major impact on your Google Ads Quality Score.

Given these statistics, it would not be an exaggeration to say that even a few seconds of delay in page load time affects big site visitor’s loss and ability sales. And this loss is amplified multiple times if you are not concerned with the speed of your mobile site.

Remember, a faster page load time not only makes your users happy, but it also lowers your bounce rate and improves your multiple conversions.

I will assume that you are like me and want to maximize your results and, of course, your income, right? So let’s start making your website faster.

Website Speed Checker Tools

• Google PageSpeed ​​Insights is a free Google page speed test tool to test the speed of your website and it is very easy to use. All you need to do is enter your website URL and the tool will analyze your content and generate suggestions on how to make your website faster.     
• Pingdom is also a very useful tool that not only tests the website speed but also reviews and rates the performance of your website. It also tracks the performance history of your website, so you can get an idea of ​​possible page speed-related changes to your website.
• YSlow is a tool that tests the speed of your website and offers advice on how to improve it. It can also provide you with a Chrome extension to check the speed of your website.
• GTmetrix page speed analysis tool that will monitor key metrics such as server response time and visual rendering time, which is what Google and its visitors will appreciate.
• Performance Budget Calculator is a free page speed checker tool that helps determine what type of content you can use to keep your site running optimally.

10 steps to improve your website performance

Website speed has a major impact on user experience, SEO, and conversion rates. Improving website performance is essential to drive traffic to a website and keep site visitors interested. So how to Increase website speed, Here we review the steps developers can take to make a website faster:

1. UPGRADE YOUR WEB HOSTING PLAN

Many people opt for cheap web hosting plans when they create a blog or website for the first time, so they choose shared hosting. As your marketing efforts begin to pay off and your traffic increases, your hosting needs change. If your website site visitors have expanded dramatically and you haven’t updated your website hosting plan to match, it’s far in all likelihood to reason slow or irregular performance issues.

Going from shared hosting to cloud hosting or shared VPS can make a big difference in how fast your website loads for visitors.

Check with your web host to see if it’s time to upgrade, or consider if it’s time to switch to a new provider. Hostinger is known as Best Web Hosting in India for having a 99.9% uptime guarantee and has Superior Speed Performance and dedicated support. Select the right web hosting plan to keep your website fast and functional. Check the list of the top web hosting companies in India.

2. START CONFIGURE YOUR WEBSITE USING CDN

The server location area is an essential element in page load time. A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a community of globally dispensed servers deployed in multiple data centers around the world. That way, every time someone requests to see your site, they can receive them from the closest possible location, thus reducing download time. CDNs speed up websites by caching content in multiple locations around the world. CDN caching servers are typically located closer to end-users than the source host or server.

Here are several good services available these days, like MaxCDN, Amazon Cloudfront, PAID and you can also choose Cloudflare which is FREE to use. 

In addition to that, there is also the option to host only parts of your site on a CDN. For example, the Jetpack plugin contains Photon, a free CDN for imaging. Just install, activate and from now on all the images on your site will be delivered to visitors through the content delivery network. 

Therefore, by using a CDN, you will save a lot of bandwidth and significantly improve page load time and website speed. You can store your CSS and JavaScript files on a CDN, in addition to images, videos, PDFs, and other varieties of uploaded content.

3. MAKE SURE YOUR WEB SCRIPTS ARE UP TO DATE

Depending on the CMS or e-commerce platform your website uses, you may need to check back periodically to determine if new versions of your site’s scripts are available. If so, update your site as soon as possible (making sure you have a current backup file first). The site’s script developers are always working to improve their code for future releases, particularly when it comes to site speed. Updating your scripts to the latest versions could go a long way in removing the encrypted hurdles that prevent your site from loading quickly.

If your site is running on WordPress, you will find these updates in the Updates tab of your WordPress dashboard. In just one click on and your website will set up the latest software program updates. You don’t need anything else.

Second, to speed up, you can update new versions of HTML, PHP, and other web technologies coming out for a reason. They contain enhancements, new features, and often improved speed. For that reason, it is important to stay current.

A quality host will take care of this and notify you if your PHP version is out of date. However, that does not relieve you of the responsibility to verify. When you log in to your hosting server, be sure to look for the latest PHP version configuration or a similar menu item. Here, you can often control what version of PHP you are using.

Just a quick note: some older code (and older WordPress versions) are not compatible, for example, with the latest PHP version. For that reason, when upgrading, be sure to try a temporary site first and back it up. This way, you don’t accidentally break your live site and you have an easy way to reverse your changes if something goes wrong.

4. OPTIMIZE AND COMPRESS THE IMAGES SIZE

Everyone loves flashy images. In the case of successful e-commerce sites, images are a vital part. Lots of photos, images, and graphics on your product pages enhance engagement. The downside to using the image is that they are generally large files that slow down a website. Images comprise a large percentage of Internet traffic and often take longer to load on a website since image files tend to be larger than HTML and CSS files. 

Image optimization generally involves reducing resolution, compressing files and reducing their dimensions. TinyPNG used to be one in all the best image optimizers, however, you may probably get much higher outcomes with ShortPixel and its lossy photo compression. It will automatically compress the images when you add them to your WordPress website. It also has a bulk optimization tool so you don’t have to manually optimize your existing images.

If you prefer a free plugin, try WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer. Both plugins will compress any image you upload to your site, but the results will not be as compared to premium image optimization services. If you using Drupal or Joomla as your CMS, take a look at this tool Kraken, which is likewise an exceptional tool for compressing images.

Also, consider using CSS scripts, as they can also boost & speed up your website. A sprite is a file that contains all of your images. You can create sprites with using CSS, which can specify coordinates and hide the entirety in an image beside the segment you need. Therefore, all of your images will be placed in one place and your web pages will load much faster since a large image can load faster than many small images. When optimizing your images, in addition to their size, you should focus on their format and the src attribute, which is the image URL. You should stick with the JPEG format, while PNG is good too, but not fully compatible with older browsers.

5.  ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION

Gzip compression is an effective way to reduce file size. Enabling Gzip compression can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to download your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files because they download as much smaller compressed files, which are then decompressed once they reach the browser.

How to enable GZIP compression?

There are two ways to add Gzip compression to your website. The first is to add and modify the code to your .htaccess file if you want to compress text, JavaScript, HTML, CSS or XML, and the second one you can install the Gzip compression plugin in your website’s CMS, using a WordPress plugin.

Add code to the .htaccess file

This method is quite technical, making it more suitable for advanced users. However, everybody can do it as long as they’re careful. Before continuing, remember to always make a backup of your .htaccess file first in case something goes wrong.

1. You will need to download an FTP client, such as Filezilla, to locate the .htaccess file. It is usually positioned in the public_html directory of your website.
2. Download the file and save a copy to your computer for backup. Then paste the following code before the # END WordPress line of .htaccess.
3. Upload the edited file to the same location. If FileZilla requests permission to overwrite it, click OK.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

Using a WordPress plugin

There are many plugin options available, but we’ve selected these three plugins based on their features and ease of use:

• WP-Optimize: an all-in-one solution to increase the performance of your website. The plugin will enable Gzip compression and website caching. In addition to that, it will clean unnecessary files on your website. This plugin can even optimize images to unfastened up greater space!
• Hummingbird: you have more freedom to choose which aspects you want to optimize. Gzip compression images, minification, and off-screen lazy loading are some of its main features.
• WP Fastest Cache: WP Fastest Cache plugin combines its caching process with Gzip compression to make your page fast and light.

This tool can also automatically disable emojis and optimize each post.

Since these plugins can do much more than enable Gzip compression, I suggest you try them all to see which one suits you best. After all, they are free and are updated frequently.

6. MINIFY JAVASCRIPT AND CSS FILES

By minimizing your CSS and JavaScript files, unnecessary whitespace and comments are removed to reduce file size, and as a result, the visitor’s browser handles these requests individually and slows down the website’s work. If you have a lot of JavaScript and CSS files on your website, there will be a lot of Http Requests when your website visitors want to access certain files. Since your web browser will treat those files individually, those numerous HTTP requests will significantly slow down your website.

While minimizing HTTP requests and enabling HTTP can greatly improve the speed of your website. You should bear in mind minimizing JavaScript and CSS files, as this can also substantially speed up your website. Placing all of the JavaScript files in a single JavaScript file, as well as putting all of the CSS files in one CSS file will reduce their number. This will reduce the range of HTTP requests and speed up your website. Fortunately, this does not have to be a manual process because there are several tools available online to convert a file into a smaller, smaller version of itself. For example, you can use the WillPeavy, Javascript Minifier, or Grunt tools, etc.

There are also several plugins available for WordPress that will replace the links in your website header for your normal CSS and JavaScript files with a reduced version of them without modifying their original files, including popular page caching plugins like:

• Lite Speed Cache
• Total cache W3
• WP Super Cache
• WP Rocket

It may take a little effort to get the settings right because minification can often break CSS and JavaScript, so once you’ve minimized everything, make sure to test your website thoroughly in new incognito mode.

Finally, keep your site’s code neat and tidy by adding CSS files at the top of your page code and Javascript snippets at the bottom when working with raw HTML pages. Adding your CSS files to the top of the page prohibits progressive rendering, saving resources that web browsers would use to load and redraw elements from your pages. Adding Javascript at the bottom prevents your pages from waiting for full code execution before loading, leading to a faster browsing experience for your visitors.

Shrinking code means removing everything a computer does not need to understand and carry out code, including unnecessary code comments, blanks, and semicolons. This makes CSS and JavaScript files a bit smaller so that they load faster in the browser and take up less bandwidth. On its own, minification will result in the best minimum speed improvements. However, implemented in conjunction with these other tips, it will result in better website performance.

7. REDUCE THE NUMBER OF HTTP REQUESTS

When someone new visits to your website, all elements of the website must be downloaded for them to see. That includes images, videos, animations, style sheets, scripts, fonts, whatever. For each item you have on the page, a different HTTP request is made. The more different parts each page of your website has, the more HTTP requests will be made each time when someone visits your site.

That doesn’t mean that you need to reduce your web pages to minimalist web design to reduce loading time. There are tricks you can use to identify and reduce the number and size of HTTP requests on your page without losing the style you want your site to have.

To get started, find out how many HTTP requests are on a page on your website using your browser tools. The process is similar in different browsers, here are specific steps for the main two:

In chrome:

• Right-click on the website
• Choose Inspect
• Click on the Network tab
• Reload the page

In Firefox:

• Right-click on the page
• Choose Inspect Element
• Click on the Network tab
• Reload the page

This will show you not only how many HTTP requests are required for the page, but also how long each takes to load. You may be able to detect some items on the list that are not worth the time they require that you can remove entirely. Even if it doesn’t, you have options to speed things up. There are some great ways to do it.

• Combine CSS, Java scripts and HTML files together.
• Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.
• Reduce the number of elements on each web page.
• Install a caching plugin.
• Reduce redirects, which create additional HTTP requests to your server and increase page load time.

For example, if your website responds, mobile users visiting your website will be redirected to the responsive version of it. You can take two actions to ensure that such redirects do not slow down your website. You can configure an HTTP redirect to send mobile device users directly to a device-specific URL without additional redirects, or configure a JavaScript redirect to identify an equivalent URL for mobile devices and redirect users to mobile devices. However, the latter option can cause latency, because a web page must download first on the client-side of the redirect before JavaScript can be run and the redirect can be performed.

8. ENABLE BROWSER CACHING

Browser caching is a technology that enables a visitor’s browser to store copies of individual pages on their website so that when the visitor returns in the future, content can be retrieved from the cache rather than reloaded entire page same content over and over again. 

Enabling caching can significantly improve the speed of your website and provide visitors with more rewarding user experience. Page Caching refers to the process of storing static files, such as HTML documents, multimedia files, images, CSS and JavaScript files, for easier and faster access, so that the database does not have to recover each of the files every time in request. The more requests made to your server, the longer it will take to load your website.

However, caching works only for regular visitors, as new visitors don’t have a cached version of their website. Enabling full page caching for your website can reduce your web page load time from 2.5 to 0.9 seconds. This is because there may be 30 or extra different components that need to be cached through the user the first time they visit your website, but only a few components need to be downloaded for later visits. Depending on the platform of the website you are using, there are different ways to enable browser caching.

For example, if you use WordPress, the easiest way to enable caching is to install a plugin. The best WordPress caching plugins are W3 Total Cache, which is the most popular performance plugin, and best for high traffic websites and underpowered servers.

If you are using Drupal as your CMS, you must use Varnish Cache software to take advantage of browser caching. If Joomla is your CMS, you can enable browser caching in your Joomla dashboard: go to System> Global Settings and click on System tab. You will see the Cache label below the Cache configuration label, where you click to open the drop-down menu and choose the ACTIVATE – Conservative Cache option from the list. Click save and go to Extensions> Plugin Manager, where you can enable the System – Cache plugin.

You can also enable browser-level caching at the server level, i.e. integrating caching into server-side scripts which is something your web developer can help you with.

9. OPTIMIZE YOUR DATABASE

This is an often ignored but very powerful way to increase the speed of your website, It is especially effective if you use WordPress or any CMS that is highly dependent on the use of the database. Optimizing your database is another very effective way to speed up your website. This is something you should do regularly.

When you use a CMS or even some complex plugins, the data in your database increases and your website speed slows down. This is especially true for plugins that store user data, statistics, and logs, as they can take up a large amount of data storage. Before you know it, your database will be filled with trackbacks, pingbacks, post reviews, garbage items, and unapproved comments, which can make your website significantly slower.

Therefore, clean your database regularly, but always make sure to back up your files first. Never do anything with your database before backup. There are many plugins that can help you optimize your database like Lite Speed Cache, WP-Optimize, Asset Cleanup also you can do your research and find the right ones for the CMS you are using.

After using WordPress for a while, your database will have a lot of information that you probably don’t need anymore. It allows you to clean up your WordPress database by removing things like junk posts, reviews, unused tags, etc. It will also optimize the structure of your database with just one click.

10. REDUCE EXTERNAL SCRIPTS

Scripts that you add to your website in the shape of JavaScript codes make HTTP requests on every occasion your web pages load. All scripted web page elements that are loaded from elsewhere, such as external comment systems, CTA buttons, or lead generation pop-ups, must be loaded each time when a page is loaded. Depending on the size of the script, this can slow down a web page or cause the web page to not load all at once (this is called ‘content jump’ or ‘layout change’ and can be especially frustrating for phone users).

Although you certainly shouldn’t remove all of your external scripts, you should narrow them down as that will help speed up your website. You can use GTmetrix, Pingdom tools, for example, to test which outside scripts are taking the longest to load and, if unnecessary, you can take them away.

If you embed videos and other media from a website that turns out to be slow, the speed of your website may be adversely affected. To improve your page load time, be sure to request external files only from fast and reliable websites. You may also consider limiting the number of external requests that your website makes entirely.

CONCLUSION:

Having a fast website has in no way been more important than it’s far today. People expect websites to be lightning-fast, and if they don’t meet their expectations, they risk losing a lot of website traffic and ultimately their loyal followers or their revenue. So, be sure to provide your website visitors with a perfect experience by improving your website speed and standing out from the crowd.

We hope this article has helped you learn how to improve website speed and performance. Go ahead and try these techniques. Don’t forget to test the speed of your website before and after implementing these best practices. You will be surprised that these changes will increase the performance of your website.

SPEED UP YOUR WEBSITE:

If you want us to fix and increase your website speed, please contact V Network Solution, a full-service agency that knows how to optimize google page insight speed & improve your website performance.

This blog post is originally from How to Increase Website Speed and written by V Network Solution