Techniques to speed up website
Every business needs to work very hard on their website speed to ensure better ranking and visibility on search engines.Website speed has a huge impact on user experience, SEO, and conversion rates. Enhancing website performance is essential for drawing traffic to a website and keeping site visitors occupied.There are tons of factors that influence how much time each page takes to load on your site.
How do you feel when the food you order is served after a long wait? Or when there’s a big line behind the checkout counter in the supermarket?
You simply hate it. The same way your viewers don’t like it any better when your site loads slowly. Let’s start off with some of the things that have the biggest impact.
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDNs boost the speed of websites by caching content in multiple locations around the world. CDN caching servers are typically located closer to end users than the host, or origin server. Requests for content go to a CDN server instead of all the way to the hosting server, which may be thousands of miles and across multiple autonomous networks from the user. Because the bandwidth is spread across so many different servers, it reduces the load on any single server and also protects your sites from distributed Denial of service's attacks and traffic spikes.
Optimize images
Images comprise a large percentage of Internet traffic, and they often take the longest to load on a website since image files tend to be larger in size than HTML and CSS files .If you’re using WordPress, install the WP Smush.it plugin to automatically compress your images. This will reduce the size of your images without losing any visual quality.It’s lightweight, easy to install, and works like a charm. Within seconds it can customize all your new images. It is one extremely useful answer to how to speed up my website question.
Minify CSS and JavaScript files:
Minifying code means removing anything that a computer doesn't need in order to understand and carry out the code, including code comments, whitespace, and unnecessary semicolons. When you look at what’s causing your pages to load slowly, chances are that it’s got something to do with lots of clumsy Javascript files or CSS being loaded incompetent.One of the pitfalls of WordPress and other content management systems is that a new JS or CSS file is added virtually every time you install a new plugin.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests
Every time you visit a website, there’s a whole bunch of technical stuff going on behind the segments. While words and images are loading on your screen, in the background your browser is requesting and receiving files.These HTTP requests impact page load speeds and, ultimately, affect user experience, bounce rate and SEO. The fewer HTTP requests your site sends to the server, the faster your site will load.Because of these potential issues, the total number of assets each page needs to load should be kept to a minimum. Also, a speed test should help identify which HTTP requests are taking the most time. For instance, if images are causing a page to load slowly, developers can look for a faster image hosting solution.
Reduce your redirect:
A redirect is when visitors to one webpage get forwarded to a different page instead. Redirects add a few fractions of a second, or sometimes even whole seconds, to page load time. When building a performance-optimized website, every second counts. Redirects are sometimes unavoidable, but they shouldn't be used if not necessary.
Replace PHP with static HTML where possible
PHP is great for making your site efficient and reducing the need to enter the same information multiple times. However, calling information through PHP uses up server resources and should be replaced with static HTML where it doesn’t save any time.