Improving page speed is crucial for these days because Google recent update says that Speed is factor for SEO Ranking and also slow speed website will effect on Traffic.
Every business having website to share the products and services with the world because people are easy with buying products or groceries and services instead of going shops.
Why your website speed optimization Does matter?
Website speed can affects your traffic, page views, conversions, sales and your overall reputation. these are improve by only to make website faster . As per studies shown
- 47 percent of people expect a website to load in less than two seconds.
- 40 percent of people are very likely to leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Therefore, website speed is the top priority if you want to stand out from competition. By speeding up your website not only will give positive results of page views, conversions but you will also provide better user experience .
A great user can give the strong customer base as well as can build strong brand. if user come to your website and it takes lot of time to open then what is the use of having an awesome website in terms of other elements, when people aren't even likely to stay and check it out? so website should loads fast otherwise it will lose lot of customers or followers and thus a lot of revenue.
As i said earlier that website speed is very important for SEO. if your website loading less than 2 minutes then your ranking in search engines will be higher. because Google prefers fast loading websites. Apart from speed , the user experience is another factors in google's ranking algorithm. so by boosting the speed of your website and improving your user experience then automatically improve your SEO Ranking.
As a result, you will get higher traffic and attract more quality leads that you can convert into customers and increase your sales & generate more Revenue
How to Test Your Website’s Speed?
Page Speed Insights: It is Google’s free tool for testing your website speed and it is very easy to use. All you need to do is enter the URL of your website and the tool will analyze its content and generate suggestions on how to make your website faster.
Pingdom page speed: This is also a very useful tool that not only tests your website speed, but also reviews and grades your website’s performance. It also tracks your website’s performance history, so you can have insight into any potential changes regarding your website speed.
YSlow: is a tool that tests your website speed and offers advice on how to improve it. It can also provide you with a Chrome extension for checking the speed of your website.
GTmetrix: it is also same as above tools and provide solutions on how to improve.
13 Ways to Speed Up Your Website
There are several ways to speed up your website making it truly effective and successful.The following are the easiest and most effective ways to increase the speed of your website
1. Upgrade Your Web Hosting Plan
Most of the people choose cheap hosting plans at the starting of single website. After som time their websites grow and ultimately slow down speed . In that case, the best choice would be to upgrade your web hosting plan. Upgrading your web hosting plan is the simplest and easiest way to improve the speed of your website.
If you use shared hosting, better to move a VPS or dedicated option. Either way, you will get a significant difference in your website speed. Making a decision between the two options depends on your own business needs, so make sure you explore both of the options carefully and thoroughly.
VPS (Virtual Private Servers) hosting is the best option to go for, since it uses multiple servers for content distribution (sometimes even hundreds of servers). It is also a scalable solution and appeals most to small and medium businesses, as well as bloggers.
On the other hand, with dedicated servers, you get full control, since you get dedicated resources. You don’t have to share RAM, CPU, bandwidth or anything else since all of the resources are dedicated only to you. Also, the bandwidth limits are higher but, since you don’t have multiple computers, this hosting option is a lot less flexible. However, it is much more expensive than VPS hosting.
2. Enable Browser Caching
Enable browser caching can improve your website speed significantly and give visitors to your site a more rewarding user experience. Caching defined as the process of stroing static files , such as HTML documents, media files, images, CSS and JavaScript files, for easier and faster access, so that the database does not have to retrieve each and every file every time there is a new request. The more requests are being made to your server, the more time it will take for loading your website.
When someone visits your website , the elements in your web page are trying to stored or downloaded their hardrive in a cache so that, the next user visits website , their browser will load the requested web page very quickly,without sending HTTP request to the server again.
Finally, caching works for repeat visitors only not for first time users because for first time users dont have a cached and stored content on their browsers. In spite of that , Enabling full caching for your website can reduce your page load time from 2.4 to 0.9 Seconds.
Depending on your website , there are a different ways to enable browser caching. For Example, if you are using word press, use powerful plugin like W3 total cache, WP supercache.
If you are using Drupal then use Varnish cache software for leverage browser caching. if Joomla is your CMS then enable browser caching in your Joomla dashboard- Go to settings--> Global configuration and click on the System tab. You will see the Cache label under the Cache settings label, where you click to open the drop-down menu and choose the option ON –> Conservative Caching from the list. Click save and go to Extensions > Plugin Manager, where you can enable the System – Cache plugin.
Enable browser caching at server level also, in that case you can do with help of Web developer to integrate caching into server side scripting.
Moreover, Static resources are stored in cache that you should enable caching at least once per week. you can set that by adding expires headers and configured them to a minimum of one week and maximum of one year.
Expires Headers tells the browser whether a particular file needs to be requested from a server or from the browser’s cache.
3. Enable Gzip Compression
Gzip compression can reduce the size and increase the speed of your website. when someone visits your website,the Zip files will be unzipped automatically so that content can be accessed.
there are certain plugins for Gzip compression but you can do it manually without plugin using the below code.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
There are many plugins available in market for different purposes and installing many plugins can slow down your website and also cause security issues and crashes. so you should deactivate & delete the usefulness plugins. With this plugin you will see which plugins are affecting the performance of your website so that you can decide they are unnecessary and should be removed or confirm they are providing you with actual benefits.
notably, its not a matter of the number of plugins. you have 50 plugins and have a faster website than who have installed 10 plugins on thier site. here the point is the number of plugins is important but quality of plugins is more important . for instance, social sharing plugins can greatly affect your page load time.
what my intention is you should avoid plugins that load a lot os scripts and lot of styles and perform many remote requests and overwhelm every page on your website by adding a lot of database queries.
Note: If you are using Drupal or Joomla you have no plugins to deal with in the first place because you can speed up your website by disabling modules or adding speed optimization extensions. The best advice for Drupal is to never run more than 50 modules. Only you should run those that are absolutely necessary for the functionality of your website.
As for Joomla, make sure you check out the following extensions, as each of them can boost your website speed- JQuery Easy, LLFJ, Javascript Async and Defer and Scripts Down.
5. Minimize HTTP Requests
when someone visits your website, they request certain files. Their web browser requests those files from your server by using the HTTP protocol then websites will slow by HTTP requests. These files include HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. If you have a lot of them, there will be a lot of HTTP requests and your website will ultimately get slowed down.
This is the reason you should minimize the HTTP requests.
here are some excellent ways to minimize the HTTP requests
1.Combine CSS, JS scripts and HTML files together.
2.Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.
3. Reduce the number of elements on every web page.
4.Install a caching plugin.
5.Reduce redirects, which create additional HTTP requests to your server and increase your page load time.
Combine CSS, JS scripts and HTML files together.
Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.
Reduce the number of elements on every web page.
Install a caching plugin.
Reduce redirects, which create additional HTTP requests to your server and increase your page load time.
6.Enable HTTP Keep-Alive
7. Minify JavaScript and CSS Files
Ton of Java script & CSS files can slow down your website badly. because there will be a lot of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access certain files. You should consider minifying JavaScript and CSS files to speed up your website by putting all JavaScript files into one single JavaScript file, as well as putting all CSS files into one CSS file, you will reduce their number. This will reduce the number of HTTP requests and speed up your website.
There are many minifying tools you can try, but you may want to start with a free and very easy-to-use WillPeavy plugin that can help you quickly minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. BWP Minify (Better WordPress Minify) is also a great plugin that can help you combine and minify your JavaScript and CSS files, but it’s a plugin for WordPress only.
8.Optimize Your Images
As you know Images take up a lot of bandwidth. If they are not optimized that means they are large in size, they use a lot of server resources and take more time to load. When your images are not optimized, your website can be much slower.
Therefore, consider reducing the size of your images without affecting their quality. By using a plugin that can compress your images and ensure they don’t lose quality in the process.
If your website use WordPress, try WP Smush, a plugin that will automatically compress your images the moment you upload them to your media library. if you use Drupal or Joomla as your CMS, check out Kraken, which is also a great tool for compressing images.
Moreover, consider using CSS sprites, as they can also greatly speed up your website. A sprite is one file that contains all of your images. You can create sprites with the use of CSS, which can specify coordinates and hide everything in an image except the section you need. Therefore, all of your images will be put in one single place and your web pages will load much faster since one big image can load faster than a lot of small images.
When you optimize your images, apart from their size, you need to focus on their format and the src attribute, which is the URL of the image. You should stick with the JPEG format, while PNG is also good, but not fully supported by older browsers.
When it comes to the src attribute, you need to make sure the code is right. Avoid empty image src codes. Namely, the code for an image in HTML includes the following:
When there is no source inside the quotation marks, the browser makes a request to the directory of the page or to the page itself, which can cause a lot of load on your servers and even corrupt your data. Therefore, make sure you always include the “src attribute” with a valid URL.
9. Change Your Website Theme
The theme of your website can also affect speed. no matter how good your configuaration is ,if your website theme has a complex code, your website will load sluggishly. It’s not uncommon, especially in WordPress, to change nothing but your website’s theme, only to find there’s a big increase in page load time.
10. Use a CDN
Content Delivery Network is a network of multiple servers located around the world that deliver web content to end users according to their geographic location. A CDN can host the static files of your website in order to deliver them more efficiently and reduce bandwidth and your server load.
11.Reduce External Scripts
External scripts are in the form of JavaScript codes make HTTP requests every time your web pages load. As you already know, this slows down speed of your website. Those can be external commenting systems, pop-up boxes, external fonts, website analytics services, social media boxes, such as Facebook “like my page” box, and many more.
12.Fix Broken Links
Broken links cannot be affect your website speed but they can greatly affect user experience so you should pay attention of them. further more broken links may in your CSS, Javascripts and image URL's . Check your website with tool of Dead link checker and you fix them manually.
13.Optimize Your Database
Optimizing your database is yet another very effective way to speed up your website. This is something you should do on a regular basis, especially if you are using WordPress or some other CMS that relies a lot on database usage.
When you use such a CMS or even some complex plugins, the data in your database increases and your website becomes slower. This is especially true for plugins that save user data, statistics and logs, as they can take up a lot of data storage. Before you know it, your database will become filled with trackbacks, ping backs, post revisions, trash items and unapproved comments, which can make your website significantly slower.
Therefore, clean your database on a regular basis, but always make sure you back up your files first. Never do anything with your database before backing it up. There are many plugins that can help you optimize your database, so do your research and find proper ones for the CMS you use.
If you use WordPress, for instance, you can automate the cleaning of your database with very useful plugin, such as WP-Optimize.
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