“If one thinks the website load speed is not important. Think again! A lowered speed rate by one second will result in 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction rate, and a seven percent decrease in conversion rates. The benefits of having a fast loading website are, without a doubt, significant.
The average load speed of websites in the year 2017 has increased by 22%. This article will give you the top tips to apply to the website to increase the load time.
1. Reduce the HTTP Requests
80% of a website’s load time is spent downloading the content before a page can be viewed. HTTP requests are made for the downloads to be processed; the higher the number of components, the more the page load time.
The tips to reduce the number of HTTP requests include:
- Streamlining the number of elements on the web pages
- Using CSS rather than images where relevant
- Combining multiple style sheets
- Reduce the number of scripts and placing them at the bottom of the page
Lower the server response time
The best target time is less than, which is 200 milliseconds. One of Google’s tips to maximize this is by installing a web application monitoring solution that will detect bottlenecks within your performance. Several applications, such as Yslow and PageSpeed Tools, facilitate this.
Enable compression of pages
Large pages often have a 100kb or more space and often take a while to load. The solution to this is to zip the files by compressing them. This process reduces the bandwidth of the pages relating to the HTTP response time. Several web servers can compress files before they can be sent to be downloaded. This process can reduce the download process by around 70%, according to statistics given by Yahoo.
Enable browser caching
Enable the browser cache, which will enable your users’ devices to store data in their cache within the hard drive. This will enable fast loading without having to send new HTTP requests for downloads.
Very few elements will need to be downloaded when a user revisits your website once their device has stored the data. This can reduce the load time by around 40%, according to Yahoo.
Minify Elements and Resources
It may be easy to build a website using WYSIWYG resources, but the code may end up being messy and contain irrelevant elements. All unnecessary parts of the codes increase your web page size. Therefore it is important to eliminate all the unnecessary parts such as blank white pages, additional elements, and unneeded lines.
Optimize images
Focus on three main things, such as size, focus, and the src components of your websites’ images.
Image size
Large images take a long to load; therefore, it is important to ensure that your images are microscopic without jeopardizing the quality. Crop and resize the images accordingly to match the width parameters of your pages. Lower the color depth to the lowest possible rate. Remove comments within the images.
Format
The most suitable format for your website images is JPEG. Old browsers may not support PNG fully. GIFs are appropriate for tiny graphics and animations within your website, generally less than 10 by 10 pixels.
Src
After the size and format of the images are properly edited, check on the src. Avoid empty src codes within the pages of your websites. For HTML the src code includes this : <img src=>
If there are no quotation marks, the browser will make requests to the page, which may increase the traffic on your servers and corrupt certain data. The src code should include a relevant URL.
Optimize the CSS Delivery
CSS controls the style needs for your web page. The website can access this information in two main ways: external files that load before the page renders and inline files within the HTML document itself.
An external CSS is better as it reduces the codes’ size and relays a lower rate of code duplications. Use only one CSS style sheet when designing your website styles. The most relevant is the external type.”