9 Secrets to Improve the Web Page Speed and Enhance its Performance
In today’s digital world, businesses are more focused on enhancing their online presence than improving any other aspect of their business. Even though businesses are focusing on the online world, there are still plenty of websites that aren’t user-friendly or fun to look at.
Several aspects contribute to a poorly optimized website, such as slow loading time, not designing a user-friendly website, navigating difficulty, etc.
These aspects show that your website is not only designed badly, but you will also lose conversion. This impacts the business, and there goes your chance of generating some good leads.
Around 47% of users expect your website to load within the first two seconds. If your website takes some extra time to load, i.e. more than four seconds, it negatively impacts your ability to present yourself as professionals. There is nothing you can do to make it up for it other than improve the website loading time.
Long before businesses took Google’s algorithm seriously, Google had announced that one of the key factors that determine the ranking is how quickly your website loads. So, to get higher rankings, you need to have a fast website.
This was all about how loading speed makes or breaks the impression you set in front of your customers. Now you might be thinking about how you can improve your web page speed and enhance its performance?
The answer is very simple. You have to follow some tips and secrets mentioned in this article, understand them properly and make the changes to your website. So without any further ado, let’s begin.
1-Ensure you have browser caching
Professionals suggest having browsing caching is essential because it helps the user save some fraction of seconds of the loading time which increases page speed, as previously some cache data was stored by them.
Your browser downloads all content of that specific page when you visit the website for the first time, such as images, layout, content, etc. These documents are saved as CSS and JS files. If you visit their website again, more data will be downloaded by the browser.
If you have turned on the Leverage Browser Caching, the browser will download and save the content of the webpage. This helps the user open up the website quickly the next time they open your website. This helps you accelerate the website speed optimization process, and the loading time is reduced from a couple of seconds to a mere fraction of seconds.
2- Removing the excess plugins that you do not use
The excess use of plugins can make your website loading process more difficult and confounded than it should be. This also affects your webpage stacking speed, and it creates certain security gaps that people can abuse and gain access to your website.
Therefore, if you have installed some excess plugins that you longer use, then they should be deactivated at the earliest. This enhances the web page speed and ensures your clients are satisfied with the existing plugins while also using the necessary plugins that load the website faster.
3- Reduce the HTTP requests
A study conducted by Yahoo found that around 80% of a web page’s loading time is utilized downloading different aspects of the page such as images, sheets and scripts. Since an HTTP request is made for each of these elements, the more on-page elements you’d have, the bigger will be the delay for the web page to load.
Hence, the first step in reducing the HTTP requests is to find out the elements that are making your website slow. This can be found by checking out the Developer Tools from the browser.
When you right-click and click on inspect, you will get to see the list of HTTP requests on your website. You will see a couple of columns such as Name, Size and Time. This will give you an idea about which files take the most time to load.
Once you know the main reason, you can reduce the number of requests and speed up your website. At first glance, you might feel like everything is important, but go through each of them carefully and then reduce the HTTP requests.
4- Change the website theme and optimize the images on your website
The theme you choose for your website has a great impact on the website’s loading speed. It doesn’t matter how you’ve configured the server. If your website has a complicated code, it will take time to load.
Hence you must be very careful while choosing the website design theme, and the theme should be compatible with all devices like smartphones and tablets. Since mobile web traffic accounts for 54.38% of global web traffic, it only makes sense to ensure your website is compatible on multiple devices.
The same is the case with optimizing your images. Images are one of the most crucial aspects of designing your website, and the better resolution your images have, the more time it will take for the images to load and thereby increase your loading time. Hence you must always optimize your website images for the best page load speed, SEO ranking, boosting conversions and enhancing user engagement and navigation.
5- Prevent JavaScript loading
Preventing or the more technical term is deferring it from loading the website until the elements in the website have loaded. If you prevent larger files from loading, such as JavaScript, you can make certain that the rest of the content can load without any major delay.
There are several ways by which you can defer from loading. Let’s say you have a WordPress site; the WP Rocket plugin can prevent JavaScript from loading. After installing it, all you have to do is check the box with Load JS files deferred, and you’re good to go.
If you’re using an HTML site, you’ll have to add an external JavaScript file before the , which will defer JavaScript loading.
6- Ensure there are no more broken links
One of the main features that decide the loading speed is hyperlinks and the number of times you add hyperlinks to your web pages. For better ranking, you must connect the site’s page with others, and once you add links to the website, it will be the icing on the top.
But sometimes the links are broken, which doesn’t give the first impression you’d want to give. To ensure these things don’t happen, you must frequently check the website for broken links. If you find such broken links, contact the web developer, and they will handle how to rectify the broken links.
7- Always use a reputable and reliable CMS
The website is the main point that showcases your brand’s value and online presence. The one thing that gives a website the main focal point is the CMS. In layman’s terms, CMS is the agent that empowers the website to refresh and make modifications to the website’s content.
Gradually you’ll pick up the pace to ensure your website becomes unique, is helping you generate revenue, and adds value to the readers. The most frequently used and common CMS is WordPress, and it does a very good job of ensuring all your content management needs are satisfied.
8- Use a Content Delivery Network at all times
Professionals say that the main intent behind using a Content Delivery Network (CND) is to enhance the user experience and ensure your website’s performance is not affected.
The proper use of CND makes certain that the visitors get a unique and faster web experience. Also, it is made to sustain any damages that might occur because of traffic floods.
9- Choose the perfect hosting options
Most businesses who are new to websites and making their presence felt online choose the cheapest option for hosting. This helps initially, but you need to upgrade your hosting once you get a lot of traffic. You need to choose the best hosting you can trust and have great reviews online.
There are certain aspects that you should be on the lookout for when choosing the hosting, and they are: –
- They should provide shared hosting
- It should also have VPS hosting
- The servers should be dedicated and not shared.
One of the cheapest options you could settle with is shared hosting, and it is fine for low traffic websites. It will surely crash if the traffic increases.
When you choose VPS hosting, you share a server with other websites, offering several dedicated portions of the server’s resources. It offers safety for your website but without the added cost of dedicated hosting.
As the name suggests, you do not have to share the servers with other websites in dedicated hosting. You get to enjoy the space, but you have to deal with the technical setup and configuration, which requires the expertise of a dedicated professional.
Final thoughts
These points help improve your web page speed and enhance the performance of your website without the user having to leave the website midway because of low loading speed.
