6 Ways To Speed Up Your Website
With more businesses shifting towards cloud-based website making, web users are becoming less tolerant of slow loading sites. So if a website has to function well and achieve the business goals, it got to upgrade its technical and aesthetical capabilities. As a matter of fact, Google is open in rewarding sites that load quickly, helping with SEO and SERP results. How do you ensure your website loads at a record pace, thus maintaining maximum user engagement? From professional experts to marketing gurus, here’s what they recommend to speed up your website today.
Resizing the images
Why use an image that takes too long to load? If you’ve worked on WordPress, you must have used the options to upload the image to the original size (it would resize them on WordPress itself). Now that is a handy method, but it also forces the browser to execute multiple commands simultaneously. Ultimately slowing down your site, this method is a big NO to your website performance.
Make sure you resize the images by using a photo editor such as PhotoShop or LightRoom beforehand. You can also use plugins like Smush to compress the images after you’ve uploaded them to the site.Once you upload the resized image on your website, the site will function really fast, and you will see more of user engagement.
Unnecessary Plugins
Deactivating a plugin no longer in use is not enough. You have to delete the plugin entirely from your website. Since every plugin requires additional resources to run, allocating more resources to plugins can hamper your site loading speed. Goes with this practice that you make 6-point criteria as to which plugin you actually need. Keeping plugins at a minimal, quality over quantity is the key to better website performance.
Ensuring the Scripts are Updated
Keep checking for new and more effective releases of your website scripts. If you upgrade your site using the most recent script updates and adapt to the search engine guidelines, you have hit the bull’s eyes. Updating your scripts to their latest versions cuts road to eliminating coded roadblocks that may have prevented your site from loading at record time. The site performance will work better than your business rivals, thus giving you an edge over their old-school website features.
Utilize CDNs
CDNs are a wide network of interconnected servers across the globe. When you don’t utilize a CDN, your users have to rely on the server’s central location to access your website. This lowers the page load speed, especially when your visitors are located far off from the central location of your server. Besides, not using CDNs puts too much faith on a single server that can get overloaded one day, to crash your website. But we know a way to stop that from happening.
Allowing your users to access a cached version of your website from the web host closest to them, CDNs solve these issues with great add-ons. Not just you get faster loading websites but also a satisfied Search engine optimization through it.
Enabling Browser Caching
Browser caching allows your website to store cookies and other copies in a visitor’s browser. Thus, upon returning in future, the content can be called upon from within the cache instead of reloading the entire page all over again. This saves a host of resources that are utilized to display your pages, resulting in much faster overall load times. Enabling browser caching is easy, simply use a plugin like WordPress W3 Total Cache.
CSS on Top, JavaScript on the Bottom
It is essential to strengthen your website code by adding CSS files to the top of the page and JavaScript in the bottom whenever you have to work on HTML pages. Adding CSS on the top of your script page will help to prohibit progressive rendering, saving multiple resources that web browsers would otherwise utilize, and redraw elements on your page. Likewise, when an HTML page script ends with JavaScript in the bottom, your page doesn’t have to wait for full code execution before loading, hence giving your users an agile browsing experience.
