8 Ways to Improve a Website’s Page Loading Speed

We’ve all clicked on a site hoping to get right to the point only to have a spinning wheel or dancing dots appear as the page loads slowly. In many cases the page loads in less than ten seconds, but in a world where it only takes a fraction of a second to get thousands of search results, ten seconds is far too slow. Most people will hit back and find another website to service their needs. That’s why it’s so important to improve any website’s page loading speed. Here’s how to do it.

1. Have the Right Infrastructure

Choosing the right hosting plan is important for both your business and site visitors. Top Web Development Companies will always recommend choosing a host with great upload and download times. You need a high-performance server that is dedicated to your site only. Shared servers often result in slower loading speeds.

2. Reduce HTTP Requests

Besides a great host, making fewer HTTP requests is one of the best ways to improve page loading speed. Every file on a page is an HTTP request, so fewer files on a page will definitely boost loading speed.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network

Reducing the distance between the end-user and the server gives page loading speeds a major boost. But this isn’t really practical since the Internet links users all over the globe. A CDN is the solution. Using a combination of the different types of CDNs helps to optimize page loading speeds.

4. Optimize Images

Keep image file size to a minimum. If it doesn’t need to be huge, don’t make it huge. While PNG and JPEGs are most commonly compressed, CSS sprites are useful for repetitive images on a site. They combine multiple images into one so there are less HTTP requests made, which results in faster page loading.

5. Cleanup Your Database

Take some time to get rid of unused or old data and files that are no longer needed. This will improve the speed that your web hosting server takes to retrieve data. A little deleting can do a lot of decluttering.

6. Avoid Redirects

A URL redirect will take a user from one page to another automatically. Too many of these redirects increase a page’s loading speed. Every redirect requires a new file and every new file requires time.

7. Tighten Up HTML Code

Sometimes the code can get a little inflated. It is quite possible to have five or six thousand lines of HTML code before any content. So in these instances, the code needs some trimming. Tightening up DOM will positively affect JavaScript performance as well.

8. Compress Files

Your web host can compress your files using GZip. This reduces loading time while also allowing users to receive data more efficiently. It reduces the size of your files, whether they’re HTML, JavaScript or stylesheets. If you’ve already got a CDN it’s likely that file compression is already taken care of.

Remember that when users are browsing, the expectation is for things to work extremely fast. No one wants to wait longer than they feel necessary. If you’re not sure how your website’s pages are loading, check out Google’s Page Speed Insights.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash