Best Practices and Tools to Enhance Your Website’s Loading Speed
Any business must have a noticeable presence on online platforms. You should have a professional website to expand your business in the digital world. However, this is not enough.
One of the important elements of having a valuable website is the website’s loading speed. Many businesses may not pay attention to this issue. But why does our website need to have a good loading speed?
Website speed optimization includes some actions aiming to make websites load faster. Indeed, a website’s loading speed is important since it can boost user experience and SEO (search engine optimization), enhancing the website’s visibility, usability, conversion, and scalability.
Tips to boost your website’s speed
Using CDN
Content delivery network (CDN) includes web servers distributed among geographical locations that cash content near end users. The content delivery network helps with the faster transfer of assets required for loading content on the internet. A CDN effectively boosts website speed, though it may be a more costly option.
Choosing a better host
There are various types of hosting, such as dedicated servers or VPS hosting (virtual private servers). The most common one is shared hosting since it’s cheaper and works quickly. Choosing a better and faster host can lead to better optimization. When you use shared hosting, you share the server with other websites. That is why shared hosting cannot be an appropriate host to promote your website’s speed. You can use VPS hosting or a dedicated server, which is the most expensive option. By renting a dedicated server, you can have a physical server for your own.
Optimizing your website’s images
Using attractive and creative images on your website can enhance engagement with your audience. However, images (and visual content in general) are considered large files, which usually have a negative impact on the loading speed of your website. Therefore, it’s crucial to optimize and reduce the size of images on your site. You can use ImageOptim, Kraken, and JPEGmini to make sure you are not compromising the quality of the images.
Website caching
The goal of caching is to store the current version of the website on the hosting. But how can this help your website’s loading speed? Indeed, when many users have access to your website at the same time, loading and delivering content to users takes more time because servers cannot work as usual. By using website caching, the current version of your website is rendered to all users, and therefore the web page doesn’t need to be rendered for each user separately.
Using fewer web fonts
Although web fonts are a popular element in website design, they can reduce your website’s speed. In order to prevent your website from slowing down, use modern formats and don’t include extra styles.
Decrease redirects
You should know website redirects can have a bad impact on your website’s speed due to creating extra HTTP requests. To prevent this, you should reduce or remove them. To identify them, you can use the Screaming Frog tool.
Decrease plugins
Plugins are another element that can have a negative impact on your website. When there are many installed plugins on your website, the need for more resources to run them increases. As you may know, plugins on websites increase over time, but the point is that some of them may no longer be used. Therefore, it’s better to check them and remove the unnecessary plugins.
Reduce javascript and CSS files
Just like redirects, existing a noticeable number of javascript and CSS files on your website can result in a lot of HTTP requests. Increasing the number of these requests slows down the performance of your website.
Measure Your Website’s Speed
It is important to test and measure the speed of your website and optimize it if needed. Tracking and identifying the elements slowing your website down can help you to reduce or remove them, which leads to enhancing your site’s loading speed, reaching high rankings in search results, and attracting more visitors and customers. But how to do it? There are several tools to test your website’s speed and performance:
Google pagespeed insights
By using this free Google tool, you can track the performance of your website. The advantages of this tool are that it provides recommendations on how you can enhance your website speed, and it is usable on both desktop and mobile devices. You should know Google itself uses this tool to reach and retain the best speed and performance.
YSlow
This is another tool you can use to measure your website’s loading speed. YSlow provides statistics, helping you to understand the site’s status better and make informed decisions.
Pingdom
We can mention Pingdom as a great tool for testing website speed. Pingdom has several effective features. For instance, it provides performance history and reports of your website.
Conclusion
As said previously, it’s important to track the speed of your website and see how well it performs. Having a fast, valuable website can attract more visitors to your website. This is because the visitors can get the information they want in a short time, leading to a better user experience. Increased traffic is another advantage of a website with good loading speed.
Discover how our expert team can support you in maintaining and optimizing your website by exploring our services or scheduling a free consultation today.
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