A website needs to be fast loading and responsive. As we are now using the internet more and more, where the audience likes speed. Even minor mistakes interrupt the visitor's satisfaction and they may leave your site shortly.
There are millions of people and not all of them have a fast internet connection, now you may be thinking that what I have to do with this situation, the answer is tweaking your site to help visitors. Increasing site speed can give lots of benefits over a non-optimized site.
However many experts already published their point of view and also showed how big companies manage their webpages to load faster. And small publishers can do this work too by using some little methods.
Not everywhere fast internet speed exists. There are many reasons to consider web page speed. When a visitor has a fast loading experience with your website then their changes are more to stay and explore other webpages.
Site Speed Optimization is one of the factors of SEO
It is difficult for some webmasters to know all the tactics that help boost website speed. Although, it may be a "Search engine optimization" factor?
Google also launched one of its products, by which webmasters can easily analyze webpages. High scores mean the webpage is optimized efficiently and a lower score represents there is more work to be done.
To check the performance of any site, visit Google's page speed insights. This will not only show score and insights but it also suggests what type of work should be done for proper speed optimizations.
There are hundreds of factors affecting page load speed. Pointing out these factors is a pretty big task, however, we have mentioned some of the working methods.
WordPress self-hosting and Google's blogger are different platforms. On WordPress, this work can be easily done by using plugins. But for the Blogger platform or other platforms, because of lack of resources, you need dedicated methods and tools.
Here are some tips that will help you to increase website load speed
1. Remove Unnecessary Widgets and Codes
The first step towards building a fast and better website, making it faster by finding out unnecessary widgets that take extra time to load a webpage.
There are several types of codes and widgets that may have been live on your site, only keep the important ones and remove or deactivate others.
Look into the template file and search for additional scripts and widgets. If not necessary, remove it.
You can do this work manually by editing the XML/theme file. But for beginners, it is a very difficult task. Without proper knowledge of coding and HTML, it is actually hard to find out scripts.
What if 30% of the audience have a slow internet connection and we have already installed silly scripts codes, then it might not open at a specific time. Many visitors could get disappointed. We can not fix external things but can change things that are in our control.
Select widgets and other types of Javascript codes that are not required. Few custom themes come with unnecessary widgets, find them on the theme code.
Remove any third party HTML code or more installed widgets that you don't want the show to your visitors.
Sometimes we ignore pre-installed widgets in the template and large HTML/CSS files, it takes more time to load blog contents and may degrade overall page speed.
2. Image Optimization
The next thing to keep in mind is "Image Optimization". This is a great way to boost webpage speed.
Because of the large/full-sized image, it takes more time to load contents and may consume more internet data.
To check whether your image is well optimized or not, know the image file size and quality. Images with good quality are ok but full HD images and unnecessary large-sized files could be time-consuming.
Try uploading a medium-sized image (from 50 kb to 800 Kb is enough). It will quickly appear simultaneously with contents. Otherwise, you can use image compressing software or online tools (Find on Google search).
If you find out images size are too large or have a size in megabytes. You can compress images/photos before adding to the post.
With this simple method, you can easily improve page speed. whenever a visitor comes to a blog if it is an optimized image it just takes few kilobytes to load in the browser and appear faster in comparison to a normal file.
Choosing the right Image file is a best practice for proper optimization of webpages.
Use toolur tool to compress and resize images according to the need.
3. Use Async and Defer Attribute
Async attribute is used for loading widgets, ads scripts, additional JavaScripts after the page contents.
By using this little code, It controls scripts/widgets execution time and other stuff to load with contents.
Note that, defer attribute will execute a script after Full HTML parsed by the browser. So, if you want to show a particular script widget after the whole body content then use the defer attribute.
Modern browsers only support both async and defer function.
Visitors might see a blog page content quickly for what they are searching and after loading contents Ads/widgets. These attribute tells a browser to load blog/website contents first then the whole scripts.
Without asynchronously or defer attribute, you may find that whenever someone visits a web page they have to wait for contents simultaneously with ads and large files.
The best practice for optimization is to use an async tag whenever possible.
Even Adsense also provides advertising codes with the async attribute.
How to add an async attribute in a HTML/script code.
Want to apply an async tag in your HTML/widget code, here it is.
Example
Just Add async/defer within the script code. Most of the time, Javascript requires this type of tag.
4. Minify CSS and Scripts
Minifying refers to remove unnecessary characters from a script. Also, CSS can be minified and the result may surprise you because that minified code will help speeding web pages.
The browser will execute the minified file similar to the original file but it requires fewer data.
Minified CSS actually remove some characters and compress the code efficiently. It is recommended to use the minified version instead of the original file. It will work the same as the original code.
You can use online tools like - JavaScript minifier
To minify CSS - Gift of Speed
Minify CSS for Speed Optimization
CSS and scripts can be easily modified with the above tools, remember it is not a lengthy process. It works automatically.
If you are facing errors after compressing CSS and code scripts, do not use this option.
5. Use the Cloudflare Speed Optimization feature
With an increase in new tools and automated systems, you can use the official Cloudflare service to speed up your blog, here is how.
This method is actually an alternative to manually minifying CSS. It comes with lots of free features.
The way is very helpful if you don't have technical knowledge about HTML, CSS, or javascript. It can optimize a page for loading time.
I am talking about a few Cloudflare features, first of all, I am going to describe Rocket Loader and Auto-Minify.
Both tools can easily speed up a website by optimizing the source code. Usually, source code is consists of HTML, CSS, and javascript, some modern sites have high-level programming languages.
These two features are free to use and most digital publishers are enjoying these.
If you are using Cloudflare then you will need to turn it on, these are available under the speed section.
Cloudflare > Speed > Optimization > select auto minify / turn on rocket loader.
See below images:-
Note - Sometimes, by using rocket loader, websites get broken. If that happens, turn off this feature. Additionally, If you feel that the website is not working properly, simply turn off both the tools.
You can easily register by going to the official site of Cloudflare. Modifications in domain nameservers are important to use Cloudflare. You can find the installation guide on their official webpage.
Watch the official video to learn more about speed optimization by Cloudflare.
There a lot of other optimization tools to speed up a site, but comes with paid plans.
You can suggest your own methods and improved ways to optimize website speed in the comment section, thanks.
