Whether you run an online business or just use your website to host your portfolio, if you want readers to spend time viewing your content, your website shouldn’t take long to load. In the age of quick-to-respond gadgets and applications, you can’t afford to have a slow web page; especially with the user always having many alternatives available. If you don’t believe us, consider these statistics (reported by a research conducted by Financial Times) instead:
If you add a one-second delay to your page load time, then that will mean:
- A 16% fall in customer satisfaction.
- 7% eventual loss of conversions.
- 11% reduction in page views.
If you extrapolate the above findings to multiple seconds, the number would become even more frightening. So what steps can you take to enhance your website’s performance and decrease the load times as much as possible? The answers may differ depending on the technologies and development engines you might have used, but in this article, we intended to create a comprehensive guide consisting of steps that will benefit most readers. Here is a list of steps you can take right now to make your website perform better:
Optimize your images:
For most websites, a majority of the page weight is made up of images; according to the 2016 report by HTTP Archive, the specific number is 64%. This is why it’s absolutely essential that you optimize your images prior to uploading them. If you are using WordPress, there are many top compression plugins that retain image quality to a great extent; one such example is the Optimus plugin. Other than that, some of the best third-party image compression tools are as follows:
- Optimizilla
- Kraken
- Gulp-imagemin
Decrease the requests sent to the server:
Many reports have identified that a majority of the websites send too many HTTP requests during page load. A research by Yahoo revealed that around 80% of the loading time of a website is spent downloading different portions of a page including the stylesheets, images and scripts. To see the number of requests you make, you can use the developer tools of your browser. If you are using Google Chrome, right click and select “Analyze”. Then click on the “Network” tab. Here you will see all the files on the page, their size and the amount of time it takes for the files to get loaded. Also, at the bottom left corner, you can see the total requests that are being made. To decrease the HTTP requests your website send to your server, you can prioritize content and remove some of the parts that aren’t as important as the rest. You can also group multiple files that have related functionalities and try to decrease the requests to your server.
Asynchronous CSS and JS file loading:
JavaScript and CSS files can be loaded in two ways: Asynchronously and synchronously. If you go with the latter approach, all of your files will get loaded sequentially, one after the other, in the order they appear on the page. However, if you go with asynchronous loading, multiple files can get loaded at the same time. Asynchronous loading can lead to faster page load times because a browser always loads a webpage from top to bottom; when it encounters a script file that is synchronous, it stops loading the page until that specific file finishes loading. However, if the pertinent file was asynchronous, the browser would be able to continue loading other files of the page while it was being loaded. For WordPress, you can achieve this by a plugin known as WP Rocket. After installing the plugin, go to the tab “Static files” and turn the following options on, under “Render-blocking CSS/JS”:
- Load CSS files asynchronously.
- Load JS files deferred.
Use browser caching:
Browser caching is another excellent way of optimizing your website’s performance. There are always some static files on a web server that can be cached on the visitor’s computer, to be accessed during future visits. By doing this, you are able to decrease loading time since a lesser number of files will have to be downloaded now. If you use WordPress, you can use the WP Super cache plugin to use the maximum potential of browser caching. If you want to decrease the load time of your PHP based website, you can use Zend OPcache. In Drupal, you can use the built-in caching mechanism to control caching from the control panel.
Use the right hosting plan:
Inexpensive hosting plans are a-plenty in the market at the moment and many website owners make the mistake of going for one that costs the least. However, regardless of how restricted your budget might be, you need to evaluate different available options thoroughly, based on your needs and preferences, before you decide. There are three main options available:
- Shared hosting: Just as the name indicates, you share the hosting servers and other resources (CPU, disk etc.) with other websites. This is often the cheapest option.
- VPS hosting: With a VPS hosting, you will still be sharing a server with other websites, but this time you would be having a dedicated chunk of the server resources. This is the hosting type that most people go with as it’s cheaper than getting a dedicated server and also gives you the reliability of having dedicated resources. The VPS hosting from Hostinger is one of the most cost-friendly and reliable options available in the market at the moment.
- Dedicated servers: If you choose a hosting with dedicated servers, only your website’s data resides on the machines. As you might have guessed, this type of hosting is the most expensive of the lot.
Time to first byte (TTFB):
Time to first byte or TTFB is a metric to measure the responsiveness of a server. It can be calculated using this formula: HTTP request time + Process request time + HTTP response time. You can find a website’s TTFB in the Chrome Dev Tools as a green waiting bar. In order to further optimize your website, you can decrease its TTFB. You can do so by using a sophisticated content delivery network (e.g. keycdn), a swift web host and a dependable DNS provider.
No matter how beneficial and attractive your website might be for your visitors, it will not get viewed (for long) if doesn’t load fast enough. Aforementioned were some of the quick steps you can take to optimize your website for better performance.
Optimize with a local rank checker
The local rank checker is your ideal tool to align your website with the audience. As the website owner, it helps you gain insight into your site’s SEO performance. Apart from that, you can identify opportunities for improvement, especially when your focus is on local search optimization. Remember, thousands of web users rely on keywords to find businesses in a given area. In your case, the local rank checker helps you align with the audience and to improve your online visibility.