The loading time of your website is an important factor that determines its overall success. As people generally prefer sites which load fast, they tend to lose their patience when they come across a site or a blog that responds slowly.
A study reveals that 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. And a 1-second delay in page response decreases customer satisfaction by 16 percent, which in turn results in a 7 percent reduction in conversions.
Website load speed is an important factor for search engine rankings, conversions, and the perception of your brand. Reducing a website’s loading time improves its overall quality and performance, so it is vital to keep a check on your page load time.
You can use the following ways to boost your website’s load speed performance:
Determine your page load speed
The first step towards speeding up your website’s performance is to determine the page load speed. There are several tools to help you with this and among them Google Pagespeed Insights, YSlow by Yahoo, WebPage Test, and GTmetrix are notable ones.
Through Google PageSpeed Insights, you can determine which components are slowing down your site. YSlow enables you to analyze your page speed based on a variety of criteria, while WebPageTest gives you a clear picture of your website’s performance.
Optimize images
Having large images on your webpages will drastically reduce your site’s speed. You can make use of image compressors and other advanced tools to balance file sizes and screen depiction. These tools will remove the unnecessary bytes from your image files, thereby reducing the size of your images without affecting the pictures’ quality.
Minify CSS and JavaScript files
Code, which is not consolidated (especially CSS and JavaScript files), may sometimes slow down your site’s load speed. For this, you are required to utilize JavaScript and CSS compression tools that clear up the unnecessary portions of your code.
Some of these automated tools are Minify, Google Closure Compiler, SquishIt, and YUI Compressor. These tools alter your files before you upload them onto your server, eventually decreasing the file size and allowing for increased website load speed.
Combine CSS and JavaScript files to minimize HTTP requests
Minimize the number of objects on your webpages to decrease the HTTP requests that are needed to deliver your page. For reducing the HTTP requests, you can either combine and compress all CSS and JavaScript files or combine all the CSS media styles into one big file. Convert graphical text to CSS text and remove frames and Javascript codes. Group together all the external images, scripts, and CSS files, too.
Inline CSS and JavaScript files
You can minimize your page load time by inlining small CSS and JavaScript files into the main HTML page. Housing all your CSS and JavaScript files externally can enhance your website’s performance to a great extent. This is because the user’s browser will cache the external CSS and JavaScript files by default.
Monitor your server’s performance
There are various tools available that monitor your server’s performance and point out the areas that cause trouble, helping you make the necessary changes. Many open source and freeware server and network monitoring tools like Collectd, Zenoss, Nagios, etc., are available.
Google has incorporated website load speed as one of the ranking factors in search algorithm. By focusing on the factors mentioned above, you will witness a drastic improvement in your site’s performance.
