How to improve the loading time on your website

Written by Bogdan Sandu on 09 Aug 2021
28,665 Views • Mobile Development

Creating an excellent website demands a significant amount of effort. Nothing could be more infuriating than a website that takes forever to load. When it comes to the functionality of your website, page speed is crucial. It is critical that your web pages load smoothly in order to decrease your bounce rate and enhance visitor engagement.

A fast-loading website is becoming an increasingly important aspect in customer experience (UX), search engine optimizing (SEO), and conversion rates. Almost 47 percent of users anticipate pages to open in less than two seconds. Failure to satisfy this criterion will result in a drop in conversions. Generally, the longer it takes for your website to load, the greater the rate of the page leaving.

Loading time and its importance

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Loading time, in its most basic form, is the average length of time it takes for a page to appear on your screen. It is computed in seconds and timed from start to finish. If your web pages take too much time to open or something goes wrong throughout the process, you will appear amateurish and your website will be untrustworthy.

Furthermore, if your web pages are slow, your users won’t end up at the end of the sales pipeline as you wanted.

There are several factors that demonstrate why a quick load time is critical.

  • Great search engine ranks 
  • A pleasant customer experience 
  • Better conversation rate optimization  

Because websites get increasingly sophisticated and content-heavy, it is critical to ensure that your website is optimized to minimize page load speed as much as achievable. The methods listed here provide a good starting point for determining how rapid your web pages are, as well as concrete steps you can take to enhance page loading times. Go over this list and put these techniques into action on your website.

Minimize HTTP requests:

These requests and answers move data from one network node to another. To access the page, your computer or other device will submit an HTTP request to the server.

When a search engine requests a file, page, or image from a web server, HTTP requests are recorded. There are numerous methods you may employ to reduce HTTP requests. If you don’t think you have the technical chops for it, just hire a web development team to do it for you. These will be a piece of cake for a web dev, so they might get the job done quite fast. 

Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML

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The development of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML undoubtedly aided websites in providing a rich experience despite sacrificing efficiency. It can, though, increase the total loading speed of a webpage.

Combine your CSS and JS files into a single bigger file.

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Clearing superfluous spaces, characters, remarks, and other unwanted components to shrink the size of the files also makes them able to merge easily. While it might be difficult if your stylesheets and scripts differ from page to page, managing to combine them can benefit your load speeds in the long term.

Furthermore using abbreviated writing whenever feasible allows you to utilize fewer declarations and operators, resulting in a significant reduction in code size. Minifying code entails eliminating everything that a computer does not require in order to comprehend and execute the code, such as code comments, whitespace, and superfluous semicolons.

This reduces the size of CSS and JavaScript files, allowing them to load faster in browsers and consume less bandwidth.

Reduce the number of images

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This is a significant one. Graphics improve the look of your web pages and the quality of your content. Larger pictures can take much longer to load. Because picture files are often bigger in size than HTML and CSS files, having minimal files will allow your sites to load faster.

Compressing and optimizing your pictures is one of the simplest methods to improve website loading times. You may lower the "weight" of your photos by reducing their file sizes, which can help your websites load faster. Another option would be to serve scaled images, and although this might scare non-technical people, there are WP plugins out there that do the heavy lifting for you. 

Assuming you work in a highly visual industry and you have, let’s say an architecture portfolio website, utilizing too many photos is not usually a smart idea.

When it comes to format, JPG or JPEG is chosen since it is a compressed picture format that keeps the image's integrity without wasting unneeded space. PNG pictures, on the contrary, are ideal for logos, signs, icons, drawings, text, and backgrounds with a transparent backdrop. TIFF and BMP should be avoided at all costs.

Select the best hosting option:

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The hosting company you select has a significant impact on the administration and functionality of your website. This includes its page loading times. The quality of your web hosting plan, whether favorable or poor, may have a considerable influence on the page load speed of your website. When it comes to website hosting, most individuals fall into the trap of going with the lowest solution.

Low-priced hosting is associated with bad performance. It may imply pooling resources across several websites on an overburdened server, which may result in slower loading time times. If you have a lot of traffic that causes poor loading times, you should always think about upgrading your server hosting.

Leverage a CDN (Content Delivery Network):

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A Content Delivery Network (CDN), sometimes known as a "content distribution network," is a network of computers that can aid in the speed of page loading. CDNs increase website performance by caching material in various places across the world.

If having a global exposure is vital to your internet business, you will immediately discover that connecting times might differ wildly depending on where the website is browsed from. As that nodes grow geographically until they reach the data center where your web server is housed. CDN caching servers are generally closer to target consumers than the host, or source server.

Searches for material are sent to a CDN server rather than the hosting server, which may be hundreds of kilometers away and spread across many independent networks from the user. This lets users to download data from nearby servers, and distributing the bandwidth reduces page load speed.

Enable browser caching:

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Whenever a user accesses a website, the items on each page are instantly saved on a hard drive, which is known as a cache. Browser caching is yet another type of caching that may be used to enhance page loading times. Browser caching enables assets on your website to be downloaded once to your hard drive and saved in a cache, or temporary storage space.

Those files are now saved locally on your machine, allowing subsequent page loads to be faster.

Allowing caching helps reduce the time it takes for return visits to your website to load. Since it allows the browser to save a variety of information, such as stylesheets, pictures, and JavaScript files, it avoids having to refresh the full website each next time a user accesses it. It is critical since you wish to satisfy people who visit your website regularly.

Eliminates unnecessary redirects:

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A redirect occurs when viewers to one website are sent to another. For instance, if you want to record clicks or link various portions of a website, the browser will have to shift from one URL to another. Too many redirects on your website might slow your page speed.

Set up no more than one redirect for the same resource. Of course, in some situations, such as when switching to a new domain, redirects may be required. Getting rid of unneeded redirects on your site, on the other hand, might result in substantially faster page loading speeds. If you have additional domains that result in redirects but serve no use, delete them. 

The speed of your website, or more particularly the download speed of your website or web app, is critical in providing a pleasant experience for users. It makes no difference what sort of business you run or what sector you work in; if you have a website, you must focus on improving page loading quickness.

A website has a wide range of adjustment screws that you might use to boost the page load time. Following the guidelines on this page should help your website run better.

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