3 Tips to Boost your Website Speed
Website speed is one of the most important factors to take care of when building & maintaining a website. As per market research, a slow website could result in an average 11% decline in page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
“As per research by Google, 53% of visitors leave a site if it doesn’t load in less than 3 seconds.”
Considering this standard, Google ranks website with a loading speed lower than 3 seconds higher on its search engine results.
Website speed optimization has become even more important due to heavy smartphone usage. It is a complex task to compress & squeeze the content of a full-size website in the mobile form.
Heavy optimization through effective application development is needed to ensure optimum levels of content viewability across all types of devices.
So what more advantages are there in improving your website speed?
As per MachMetrics, most websites on the internet have a loading speed of 8–11 seconds. This is far from the ideal website loading speed of 3 seconds suggested by Google.
But as I mentioned, Google still considers page speed as an SEO ranking factor. So by optimizing your speed, you automatically have a better shot at ranking higher on SERPs as compared to the competition.
Now comes the crucial part- How to improve website speed?
Well, here are the 3 easy tricks to do so:
1. Minimizing the number of HTTP requests
Over 80% of your website’s loading time is used on downloading all different parts of a page- images, stylesheets, scripts, font types, etc. Getting every single element on the website requires sending HTTP requests for each of them. A higher number of requests = more time taken to load the page.
So how to minimize HTTP requests?
First, find the number of HTTP requests made by your page.
To do so, we will use Developer Tools options within the Google Chrome browser.
Open the URL of the page you want to analyze. Then right-click and select “Inspect” (or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+I). This will take you to the developer tools section.
From here, find the “Network” tab at the top-right and click on it (expand the viewable area by dragging the left border of the developer tools section).
The above screenshot is what you’ll see in the Network tab. The table shows all HTTP requests sent for showing the webpage. In this table, the “Name” column shows all files loaded on the page, the “size” column shows their size (duh), and the “Time” column shows the time taken to load the element. The bottom left in the panel shows the total number of HTTP requests sent.
In the image above, you can see that the website analysed in this example uses only 5 HTTP requests to load its page. However, that is not the case with most websites. I have seen websites loading over a dozen HTTP requests and then having a terrible loading time.
So it is important that you check your HTTP requests and remove anything unnecessary. If reducing or removing anything isn’t possible, then perhaps the next trick could help.
2. Minifying and combining files
The first point helped you see the number of HTTP requests sent by your website. In this next trick, we’ll try to reduce as many requests as we could by combining and minifying files.
The HTML, CSS and JavaScript files make up for almost the entire front-end of your website. And they also make for the most number of HTTP requests on it. By minifying and combining your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, you can reduce the total number of requests and reduce their sizes at the same time.
This aspect of website development is taken care of by developers in custom website development. But minifying and combining needs special attention if you’re using a templated website builder such as those provided by WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc.
Minifying: Involves the removal of redundant formatting, codes, and whitespaces.
Combining: Exactly what it sounds like- combining multiple files of the same type into one (combing two separate CSS/JavaScript files).
If you’re using a templated website builder, minifying and combining merely requires installing a plugin, activating the same and boom!
3. Minimizing TTFB
A part of website speed optimization is to minimize the time it takes to load a website. However, an important part often forgotten is the time taken before loading a website, i.e., the time taken by a server to start loading the website on the browser.
Time to First Byte or TTFB is basically the time taken by the browser to load the first byte of data from a website server. Google recommends TTFB to be lower than 200ms.
The previous tip we discussed was about the front-end, this is about the back-end of your website, i.e., the server.
Whenever someone visits a website, the browser sends the associated HTTP requests to the server, which then sends information to the browser for loading the website. TTFB is visible in between this communication between server and web browser.
Similar to the first tip, we can use Google Chrome’s developer tools to see the TTFB.
After going to the Network tab as we did in the first tip, you need to hover over the first item seen in the “Waterfall” column of the table.
In the small box that appears upon hovering, we can see the “waiting (TTFB)” which in this case, is at 0.24ms. Quite commendable, Smash Magazine!
If your website’s TTFB is lower than 200ms, then there’s no reason to worry. But if that’s not the case, then here are four possible reasons why you have lower TTFB:
1. Network Issues
This is one of the only two issues that are not under your control. All you could do to not face such a problem is to ensure that you’re using the services of a reliable hosting provider and that everything is peaceful in the world.
2. High Traffic
High traffic is another reason for low TTFB that is simply out of your control. It is highly recommended to not go for shared hosting services, as they only worsen your website speed, including TTFB in such scenarios. You can upgrade your website capabilities or VPS of your VPS to accommodate a higher amount of traffic without affecting TTFB.
3. Problems in Web Server Configuration
Web server is not your hosting platform, it’s the software that it runs on. There are several issues that can plague a web server, resulting in bad configuration and ultimately, a bad TTFB.
4. Dynamic content creation (especially in WordPress websites)
This issue is especially prevalent in WordPress-powered webpages. When a web server provides dynamic content to a browser, the dynamic pages have to be built by the server. This takes time and eventually results in higher TTFB.
There is one workaround to counter the dynamic content creation issue in WordPress, called caching. Caching refers to the process of pre-building the page on the server, have the HTML ready and send it to the browser whenever a user visits the said website.
Caching helps in bypassing the TTFB problem in WordPress sites and ultimately boosts the website loading speed.
Let’s Wrap Up!
These three tricks mentioned here covers almost everything that you need to work on for optimizing your website speed. There are various other factors that affect website speed, of course. But having control over the above-mentioned three points helps take care of most, if not all website speed-related problems.
