Ways to Make Your Website Load Faster
Online buyers are searching for the quickest, safest route to your product. A page should load in two seconds or less, according to 47% of consumers, according to a survey by Akamai Technologies. Here are ten strategies to maintain the performance of your website:
1 Implement a content delivery network of your own
Static files from a website, like CSS or JavaScript, are distributed among a number of global servers, and they are delivered from the server that is closest to the user's location. In other words, because the file is distributed from a nearby server when a user clicks on a video, it loads more quickly. Larger websites use CDNs to provide a much faster, more accessible experience for visitors from all over the world.
2 Use adaptive images
Adaptive images are used. Images make up 61% of a website's page weight on a desktop computer, according to the HTTP Archive. To save bandwidth and increase page speed for your website, start by using tools like Picturefill or Adaptive Images. Adopting new image formats, such as WebP and JPeg XR, is an additional choice that can reduce image weight by twenty to fifty percent without compromising image quality.
3 Cache
Cache everything. Browser caching keeps cache copies of static resources, which greatly speeds up pages and lowers server lag. Unless a page has changed since it was last cached, the cached version usually appears when a user visits your website. This implies that the browser reduces the number of requests made to your server and speeds up the loading of your website.
4 Evaluate your plugins.
Plugins can add new features and functionality to your website, but the more plugins you have, the longer it will take for your website to load. The performance of a website can be significantly slowed down by subpar or outdated plugins; this issue can be resolved by removing plugins that duplicate functionality, are outdated, or are no longer in use.
5 Combine images into CSS sprites
To create CSS sprites, combine images. Multiple roundtrips to the server are required to secure all the resources when there are multiple images on a page, which slows down page load time. Sprites combine all background images on a page into a single image, so when the main "sprite" loads, all background images on the page also appear. This lessens the possibility of flickering images and improves the user experience.
6 Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers
Enable the response headers for HTTP keep-alive. Simple HTTP requests grab one file, distribute it, and then close. Nevertheless, this procedure is not always quick. Web browser and server can agree to use the same connection to download and send multiple files when keep-alive is enabled. In other words, rather than opening a new connection for each request, the server keeps the connection open while a user is on the website, reducing the load on the processor, network, and memory.
7 Configure expires headers
The website files are saved on a user's computer after they visit your website, making it easier for them to access it later. The file header contains an expiration date that specifies how long these files will be kept on the recipient's computer; this date is typically set to 24 hours by default. Increase the expiration date to avoid having an impact on your server and page load time, or configure the expires header to ensure that the files never time out.
8 Compress your content.
You can significantly reduce the amount of content you use to speed up your website. Popular web servers like Apache and IIS automatically compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using the GZIP algorithm. Even online compressor services are available to take out extra spaces and characters from your HTML and CSS code.
