Loading page speed of a website plays a significant role in the success of any digital product. Having a website that loads fast can enhance the experience of your customers & keep them engaging. When it comes to loading speed there are a lot of factors that affect it.
And in order to provide your customers with optimal website speed you have to fix all these factors.
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Minify & combine files
- Asynchronous loading for CSS & javascript
- Defer javascript loading
- Reduce server response time
- Choose right hosting
- Reduce image size
- Compression Audit
- Enable browser caching
How can I speed up my page load speed?
1. Reduce Image Size
Often times, images on site pages are large files when they don’t need to be. Many online services offer image compression without losing quality.
2. Reduce the number of plugins
Deactivate and delete any plugins you’re using that you don’t need. As mentioned earlier, each plugin makes it own server requests and contains its own coding.
Disable the plugins one at a time and continually test your site speed to see if one plugin is specifically slowing the site down.
After knowing how to improve page speed, you should keep an eye on “What is page speed?”
Page speed:
Page speed defines the total loading time of a particular web page. This can be important for ranking purposes if your web page has a shorter load time than other website pages then search engines should be given higher priority.
How to improve page speed:
Here we discuss some tips that can help you improve your page speed. If you want to speed up website optimization, then keep an eye on these tips
1. Proper Image Size: Make sure your page images are not larger than the version the user uses. The image size, which is declared by the lighthouse, is 100 KB. Place images under this category to improve page speed.
2. Remove unused CSS: All unnecessary CSS needs to be removed from the source code but first, make sure that the functionality of the source code has not changed. This can improve the size of the network payload when you shrink the CSS.
3. Avoid Multiple Redirection: According to the Lighthouse Report, redirection is the biggest reason for slowing down your page speed. Whenever the browser requests a resource that has been redirected, the server takes an HTTP response to retrieve the resource that takes time in this process.
4. Use Content Distributed Network: Content Distributed Network known as Content Delivery Network which is used to distribute the load time of content. It helps to provide users with fast and reliable access to your website.
5. Javascript Minimize: Many people forget to collapse JavaScript, then you should remove unwanted JavaScript from your page which is one of the main reasons to slow down the page load speed.
6. Intelligently designed website: This is one of the important tips by which you can solve half of the problem. Choosing the right font and visual elements helps to give you a better user experience as well as helps it load efficiently. Want help designing a website? Click here
7. Enable Browser Cache: Browser cache is required to download all page elements that need to be downloaded. Once downloaded and stored in the cache it does not need to be downloaded the next time.
8. Use of lazy load images: Lazy load images are one of the best techniques that improve page speed. Lazy load images get loaded with the user’s scroll. Lazy images are not required to be displayed on the first fold of the screen.
Server and Web Hosting should be second priority first you must make a optimized website
Below are some points to consider while developing application to boost user experience and performance of your application.
- Minimizing HTTP Requests.
- Adding Expires or Cache control header resulting in loading most of the contents in browser from cache rather than reloading.
- Using Gzip/deflate compression for static and dynamic contents
- Avoiding inline CSS. so as to load initial page faster
- Using CSS on the top of the page
- Avoiding inline java script code.
- Putting java scripts at the bottom of the pages.
- Compressing JavaScript and CSS files.
- Building reusable components viz. CSS, java scripts, routines, etc. to maximize the reusability and minimize the code size.
- Cache the static contents viz. images, java scripts, CSS, etc. or deploy them on separate server(cookie less) for better performance (It reduces the waiting period of user and can start his/her work while static content gets loaded)
- Images are taking at least 80% of the total page load time. We optimize image size and using lazy loading concepts (on demand loading) for images so that will not block required content. We are reducing number of DOM elements in pages.
- Using minimum DOM elements in web pages.
- Avoiding unnecessary server responses viz. “404 Page not found”.
- URLs are meaningful & user friendly
- Explanatory HTML page titles
- Clear, descriptive Major headings
- Using tags like Emphasis (bold, etc.) carefully
- Avoiding @Import tag for CSS anywhere in website.
- Following W3C standards for HTML and CSS.
Use a CDN
A CDN (Content Network Delivery) provides faster experience for your website’s content to people based on their geographic location.
Here’s how it works.
As you can see above, a CDN provides faster experience to the people who are browsing your site from their closest proximities.
You can either use hosting services like WPX hosting which by default provides a global CDN or use a free CDN like Cloudflare to improve your website overall loading times across the globe.
Use a better hosting service
Whether you know it or not, your web hosting plays a crucial role as it highly impacts your site loading times. That’s why you need to prefer managed hosting services like WP Engine, Kinsta, WPX hosting etc.
Most people go for shared hosting plans and that’s why majority of the sites load really slow as those servers are shared with a ton of people whereas managed servers or dedicated servers host less sites which help you with faster loading times.
Enable page caching
Page caching is the temporary storage of web documents such as images and your web browser stores copies of web pages you’ve visited recently to reduce its bandwidth usage to provide faster speeds to the users.
By enabling caching, you can have faster page loading times. You can install caching plugins like WP Rocket, W3 total cache etc to easily boost your page performance and minifying all the cache files on your site.
