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If you have a business, organisation, or personal brand, chances are you have a website. As more and more people are going online to find information, buy goods, book services, and find entertainment, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a flawless website to give your visitors a faultless browsing experience.
People have little patience for slow load times these days, as some of the largest websites—like Facebook and Reddit—can load in under three seconds. You can use a website speed test tool online (you can find these for free!) to check how fast your website loads. If it’s taking longer than three seconds, you could be losing half your visitors for that reason alone. Here are some tips on how to build a website with fast loading speeds.
Use a reliable hosting provider
Your website hosting provider is more than likely hosting your website on a server with many other websites, which can slow down your site’s loading time. To avoid this, find a provider like Krystal that will host your website on a private server to ensure rapid loading times.
Use a responsive theme
Responsive themes are designs that automatically update to fit different devices and aspect ratios, as opposed to a static page that needs to be recreated for each device, like for desktop, mobile, tablets, and laptops. Responsive pages don’t need to be duplicated and resized – they simply automatically resize themselves because they’re coded to adjust.
Web pages built using responsive themes will load faster, as they’re more efficient, and are better optimised. You can find lots of responsive templates that are pre-built, or if you have the knowledge and technical skills to code your own, remember that content determines the design rather than trying to fit your content into a specific design. This will help you map out your website and arrange it better for a responsive layout.
Use caching to your advantage
Browser caching significantly increases the load time for visitors, as it means less requests to the server. Cached versions of your website pages will be stored, so when someone visits your website, they’re served the cached version as opposed to requesting a full-page load. If one visitor is viewing multiple pages on your website, the loading times can add up and bog down the browser, making it a slow and painful loading process. Cached versions take much less time to load since there are fewer server requests.
Use optimised images
Another major server request that can affect load times are the images on your website. A good website will have plenty of images, from background images to icons to products, so it’s not like you can just remove the images to make your website load faster. Instead, make sure whatever images you’re using are optimised and sized properly. An image that’s 4000×4000 pixels with a 300 dpi will be a huge file size and will slow down your site, and you hardly ever need an image that big. Reduce the size without affecting the quality too much, and your website will load much faster. Additionally, you can group all the images on one page together using CSS sprites, so that instead of loading separately and requesting multiple pulls from the server, you only request one and all of the images load at the same time as one large image.