One of the most important tasks of a website operator is to ensure that the visitor's experience on their website is as smooth as possible. Factors such as how long it takes your homepage to load are important considerations, especially as traffic from mobile devices continues to increase. If it takes too long to load, your website will lose a lot of visitors very quickly. To optimize for speed, you should keep your site performance in mind: work on improving it regularly, and you'll soon realize that your visitors are spending more time on your site and viewing more pages. Improving your website's performance will also have the added benefit of being more attractive to search engines, which means you'll ultimately benefit from better rankings.
How to Optimize Website Speed and User Experience
You can use a free website speed test such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to measure your current website speed. These tools measure and evaluate web page performance. They are also useful when considering aspects that are not web-related, such as media content or HTML code structure. For example, Google tools analyze the desktop and mobile versions of your website to give you an overview of what needs to be improved.
If you're wondering what affects your website's load time, you're in the right place. In this article, Popeye will tell you what factors commonly slow down your website; if your site speed does suffer, we'll go through possible solutions to improve it.
Server Hosting
You should start by asking yourself: Does your current hosting platform meet the requirements of your web project? Most website operators want to save money when choosing hosting and tend to go for the cheapest option. But this comes at the expense of server performance and capacity. Thrift has a downside: for example, the platform may lack the necessary bandwidth to handle all user requests. With cheap hosting solutions, multiple parties share a single server, which does not allow for growth of a particular website or increase in the number of visitors. Another typical mistake is hosting your website on a server located abroad, which can actually increase your website's load time.
what to do:
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Use a flexible hosting solution with unlimited web space and traffic
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Only rent servers located in the same country as the majority of users
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If you plan to reach an international audience, use a CDN content delivery network
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Manage hosting yourself so you can adjust to your project's needs
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
When a visitor hits your website, their browser requests an HTML file on your server and displays it according to the included CSS formatting. The same applies to integrated JavaScript elements such as banners or news, etc. The loading process can take a long time, depending on the size of the file and the amount of code that needs to be read and converted. Including design sheets and scripts is essential for a dynamic website - forgoing CSS and JavaScript for greater site speed is not advisable. Therefore, the focus should be primarily on optimizing your website code.
what to do:
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Use HTML only for things CSS can't
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Use separate files for CSS and JavaScript, and include CSS and JavaScript code in HTML pages only in special cases (JavaScript should always appear at the end of the document, before the closing body element)
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Merge and minify code files (more on CSS Minification)
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Use the latest programming technologies, such as WebAssembly
Images and External Content
Multimedia content is an important part of a good website. Like design and layout, it dictates the look and feel of your site and helps structure and contextualize body text. Especially in e-commerce, it is very important to showcase your products with high-quality images. Every extra image or photo adds to load times - especially if they're stored on a remote server instead of your own. The same applies to other media files such as music, videos or PDFs.
what to do:
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Load as few elements as possible from external sites
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Avoid unnecessary images, videos, etc.
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Use tools to compress images
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Outsource images to external servers
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Specify the width and height of the image (otherwise the browser will calculate the dimensions by itself)
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Use SVG Icons (Scalable Vector Graphics)
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Lazy loading with jQuery plugin, which stops loading images if they go out of bounds (they only start loading when a visitor scrolls to them)
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Use the more efficient image format WebP
cache
Many websites run slowly because they drop their cache. But what some website owners don't realize is that a well-configured cache can help optimize your website – with very little effort. This is because cached content doesn't need to be called by the web server on every click, which means pages load much faster. It also lightens the load on the web server because it has fewer requests to handle. All static elements such as JavaScript and CSS files, images or documents can be cached. Here, it is also possible to define how long they remain cached.
what to do:
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Use the visitor's browser as a cache: activate the "mod_expires" module on the Apache web server and define how long the corresponding file type should remain in the cache; the respective user's browser does the rest
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Set up a reverse proxy server and use it as a cache. Alternatively, you can use a Content Delivery Network, where you have access to an entire network of globally distributed reverse proxy servers
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Use caching software like Memcached to temporarily store dynamic content in memory, which allows you to minimize database access
More Website Optimization Tips and Tricks
In addition to the above ways to optimize your website's performance, there are many smaller steps you can take to help minimize load times. These include:
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Keep redirects to a minimum
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Specify character encoding in HTML documents
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delete any wrong content
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Avoid overusing plugins in your CMS
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Limit the information collected in cookies
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Use a favicon (since browsers always search for favicon.ico files on web servers)
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Enable HTTP/2
If you haven't already used one of these tools to make your website run faster, now is the time to start keeping up with the competition. According to a 2017 Google survey, users are 123% more likely to abandon a mobile site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load. When a page loads faster than 5 seconds, the odds of page abandonment increase by 90%. Therefore, website speed should be a top priority.
If you don't want to lose potential customers due to poor load times, you should optimize your website to succeed in the mobile age.