Slow loading website is one the reasons of high bounce rate and low conversions rate. The best thing related to performance about website is that it should open up quickly otherwise potential visitors will switch to another website that has been optimized for fast loading.
In order to understand why you need a fast loading website, please check the following statistics:
- A potential website user will leave website if it doesn’t load within an average time of 3 seconds.
- Google now considers website speed as a major ranking factor.
- More than 75 percent of uses agreed that they would not return to a website taking more than 4 seconds to load.
Having fast loading website is extremely crucial these days to persist in the modern competitive era. There is no room for slow loading website and Google also gives them less credit.
Over the years, usage of smartphone for internet browsing has increased a lot, so that you should also consider the mobile version of your site as an important aspect for better conversion. An effective, responsive template can be handy to attract mobile visitors.
OK. So we now know what impact a slow loading website has but the answer what many of us always search for are what to do to come out of this and have an efficiently fast loading website. There are many factors behind this such as size and quantity of multimedia files and number of files your website requests from your server when your site is accessed for the first time. Unnecessary large files can drastically slow down page rendering. The load time of a website is directly associated to the request made on the server. If the number of HTTP requests made to the server are more the slower website will be.
The term used these days is ‘speed optimization in websites’ is actually about making adjustment in the coding, layout, and images/multimedia files of your website.
Following are some important suggestions when can potentially help to improve website loading speed.
Set Website Performance Plan
Setting up your website total size would help you assess website speed. If the size of your website is controlled and monitored particularly the home page and ensure that it doesn’t exceed a set size then depending on several factors you can load its page quickly. Prepare for the future risks such as you may need to add extra element or replace them with other should not impact your overall size of your website.
Compress Images
Most common and concerning issues that most of the website face, is use of high resolution images. However, use of high resolution images help visitors notice even minor details but the dilemma that arises with high definition images is, they can slow down website loading process.
Here you need to compress all images for web-based quality. You can do this with the use of default image compressor built into Google’s Page Speed plugin. You just need to save the compressed version of image and replace it with uncompressed image.
Once you are done with compressing the images, then you need to scale your images. This will avoid server lag needed to re-sized images. You can scale images using Photoshop by adjusting the pixel dimension that they will be in your HTML code.
Adaptive Images is one of the best solutions that identifies the screen size and automatically creates, cache, and delivers re-scaled versions of our websites embedded HTML images.
Minify CSS / JS and HTML Files
Loading multiple CSS and JavaScript files can horribly ruin your website loading speed. HTML, CSS and JavaScript should be minified or compressed. Normally, custom CMS based websites that have utilized plugins and theme features may often contain more than 15 JavaScript and CSS files. These Style Sheets and Scripts should be combined into a single file. Doing this can ridiculously boost up your website load speed and make it easily accessible. There are number of excellent tools available on the web such as JSCompress, MinifyCSS and HTML Minifier that minify these types of files.
Hosting Selection
It is very crucial to choose a reliable web hosting service to ensure that your website remains safe and can be accessed quickly. Your web host is the backbone of your website that can provide a fast load time to a single visitor or millions of them. Hosting costs you few dollars a month for joint (shared) hosting and hundred dollars or extra if you thinking for dedicated or cloud services. Decide the configuration and select servers based on the size of your website, features needed, amount of traffic, JS, images, Videos and so on.
Sometimes it is also good to take a look on your competitors hosting provider. WhoIsHostingThis? will tell you the hosting provider that your competitor is using. It is worth investing in using high configuration hosting for high speed website optimization.
Some crucial technical changes you can apply with the help of experienced programmer.
- Adding expire headers in .htaccess site. Server side module 'mode_deflate' module should be enabled.
- Using server side compression module e.g. gZip
- Compressing JS and CSS code.
- Merge all js and css in to one file to reduce http calls to server.
- Use images by css sprite to reduce http calls to server.
- Increase memory limit on server.
- Increase SQL setting for query buffering..etc.
- Optimize site code and to have minimum calls to MySQL, do not load unnecessary data from MySQL, remove unnecessary loops from code.
- Compress HTML and remove unnecessary space from code.
- Use advance caching system like varnish or APC
- We would also suggest to go with CDN (Content Delivery Network) for Images and other assets and it gives great performance.
Popular Website Links to have report on your website current speed and factors resulting in that.
Conclusion
Having a fast loading website is required for success on the web. It is worth investing time and money making several adjustments in order to have fast loading website that search engines such as Google love and give more credit. We highly recommend you to take urgent action and have a fast loading well optimized website.