6 Tips to make your website load faster
Your website loading speed plays a huge role in SEO and User Experience. A website that is quick to load will improve your website’s Google ranking and prevent users from bouncing off. You should aim for your website to load in 2–3 seconds. The 2–3 seconds is the tipping point where bounce rates go up as consumers tend to abandon a site after 3 seconds.
How to measure the loading speed of your website?
There are a ton of paid as well as free tools you can use to measure your website’s loading speed. Many SEO analysers like Ahrefs and Semrush where you can check the speed with a simple site audit. Some free internet tools you can use to check your website’s loading speed and also get suggestions on how to improve it are listed below:
- Solarwinds Pingdom
- Google PageSpeed Insight
- GTMetrix
Here are some SEO best practices you should follow to reduce the loading speed of your webpage:
Choose a Good Hosting
When you visit a website and load a page, you are essentially running programmes on a remote computer and opening files from a remote computer (the web server). The faster the remote computer, the faster your webpage can load. Here’s how to choose a good hosting plan:
Choose a dedicated server over shared servers
The first step is to select a hosting plan that includes dedicated resources; this prevents other websites from using your website’s resources (e.g., processor and memory). That’s why it’s better to opt for a VPS or a dedicated server over a shared hosting plan even tho they are cheaper.
Check for additional resources
More processing power and memory on your server allow requests to process more quickly.
Local resources
Having your database and other resources on the same web server rather than on another server can help improve performance.
Host with CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is used to distribute copies of your site’s files across multiple data centres. This can improve performance by shortening the distance that data requests must travel between browsers and your host’s servers. You have several CDN options, one of which is to choose a host that offers a CDN.
Use Sprite Images
An image sprite is a group of images combined into a single image. A web page containing a large number of images can take a long time to load and generate multiple server requests. Using image sprites reduces the number of such server requests.
Minify your CSS, Javascript and HTML
The page loading speed can be improved by optimising your file load. Minifying your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code can also help. This entails removing unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, and other elements to reduce file size.
Optimise your media
The best way to decrease your page size and increase its loading speed is to optimise images. This could be done by compressing the image or by changing the file format.
Compress your code
Enabling compression of your code using Gzip is the easiest way to decrease the load time of your page. Gzip is a file format and software application that searches for strings of similar code in your text files and replaces them temporarily to make the files smaller. This can be done for your HTML and CSS code as they have more repeated sequences and white spaces.
Enabling browser caching
When you visit a website, the elements on the page are cached, or temporarily stored, on your hard drive. So the next time you visit the site, your browser will be able to load the page without requiring another HTTP request from the server. After the various components have been saved in the user’s cache, only a few components need to be downloaded on subsequent visits.
Hope you found these tips useful!
Do check out our work on www.designway.in
