Patience is not what you can expect from the visitors of your website. Time is precious and the market is as big as the ocean. Whether they are using smartphones or PC’s they expect the website to load immediately. When people have choice they will not wait for you no matter how good your offer is. The load speed of your website also scores you points for the SEO. So, here is how to reduce loading time of website.
More than 45% of the people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. Hence, there is no place for websites that take long to load. You are never going to make enough conversions to have your business thriving. There is no magic that can have your website load in a blink but there is smart work that needs to be done.
Compression
High quality content would definitely mean that the size of a page would be more than 100kb and would become slow to download. ‘Compression’ helps in speeding up the loading time of the pages. The process involves zipping the pages which reduces the bandwidth of the pages which ultimately reduces the HTTP response. There are tools that can help you with this procedure and around 70% of your download time is saved just by ‘Compression’.
Image Optimizing
Another way how to reduce loading time of website is image optimization. There are three basic things that need to be focused on – format, images and src attribute.
The format of the images should not be TIFFs or BMPs. JPEG is what you should opt for, although PNG is also a good option but it may not be compatible with old browsers.
Images that are big in size take a lot of time to load and you should have proper editing tools so you can have your images cropped to the right size, remove all image comments and finally decrease the depth of the image’s colour as low as possible.
Empty src codes are bad for your website and it is important that you have the right code for your images. A browser will send a request to the page or the directory of the page in the absence of any source which will add on to the traffic of your server and could also corrupt user data. A src attribute with a proper URL is must.
Get Rid of Unnecessary Plugins
Getting rid of harmful plugins is also a way to reduce loading time of website. Plugins do have many positive points and are quite useful but if you have embedded too many plugins in your website get ready to face regular crashes, a decelerated website and security problems. You could disable the plugins and then measure the performance of the server to identify the ones that are unhealthy to your website.
DNS Look-ups
The browser will not function unless a DNS look-up is complete and looking up the IP address for any hostname consumes a fair amount of time. The response time could be increased if the number of unique hostnames is reduced. Using ‘Pingdom Tools’ the DNS look-up time of a website can be determined. You can use ‘Sprite up’ technique where the number of HTTP requests that a browser sends to server are reduced and your website loading page becomes from good to awesome. A webpage that comprises of several images such as buttons or icons take longer time to load and ‘Sprite’ is when several small images are merged together to form one big image thus reducing the requests and improving your load time.
The Scripts Should be Kept Below the Fold
Most of the websites make the mistake of keeping their JavaScript files before the content which means they load before the rest of the page. This means that your potential customers have to wait till the JavaScript files are loaded and then see your page. Placing your JavaScript files at the bottom of the page will solve your problem, thereby increasing the loading speed of your website.
Another way to do it would be to use async or defer attributes while placing external .js files on the website. This is also a more controlled way. There is a thin line of difference in defer and async attributes and it is important that you understand the difference so as to use them in the correct way.
- Defer attributes will load the scripts once the content has been completely loaded. The scripts run in order with defer attributes.
- Async tags load scripts simultaneously with the remaining page and the scripts loaded are usually not in order. The lighter files generally load first while the heavier ones are kept for the last. Although this could work perfectly for some scripts, for others it could be ruinous. Every script should be tested to make sure that the attribute does not break your website.
Browser Caching
A visitor is likely to return to your website if he/she likes it and you don’t want to load the same page they have already loaded to load again and again. This is simply wasting of time. Browser caching lets store’s some data on the computer of the visitor temporarily which saves them from downloading the same page every time they come to your website. The duration of the data stored on the browser of the visitors depends on the configuration of their browser and the cache settings of your server. You could either enable the browser caching yourself or have it done from your hosting service provider.
Minimize Redirects
Minimizing redirects is another way how to reduce loading time of website. Advertising is quite important but creating too many redirects will hamper the speed of your website. If you wish to have a responsive redirect and maintain the loading speed of the website then, use a HTTP redirect for sending users with smartphone user agents straight to the URL that is meant for the mobile, removing all types of intermediate redirects. Another way is to add “<link rel=”alternate”> markup” in your PC’s desktop pages so the mobile equivalent URL’s can be recognized and discovered by the Googlebot on your mobile pages.
Following the above tips will help your website to function smoothly and load fast.
