It seems quite crazy, but the loading speed of a web page is a crucial factor behind its success in the virtual industry. Google considers web page loading speed as a factor of ranking over the search results. If a web page doesn’t load fast, chances of getting a good rank over search results are quite minimal. The other drawback of slow loading speed is the cut off a large number of possible visitors just because they can’t hang on for slow page load. Therefore, it is essential to know the tips to design the web pages in such a way that they load fast, driving huge traffic. Internet users are quite impatient and thus they will switch immediately to another site if one is loading like a turtle.
There are plenty of factors that reveal how a web page will load, so there are multiple tips to increase your page speed and enhance user experience. In this blog post, we’ll go for renowned tips, you can use to lower down the load time and improve your website’s performance.
Let’s Get Started
- Optimize Images
Once the image is designed through Photoshop or something similar, just save it in context to web only. The thing is that other images include additional colors that are not useful thus, they are taking unnecessary space. In optimizing we apply some sort of compression, thus the only colors that are really needed to display the image on the webpage go into the file.
- W3c Standard Code
Make sure that the code of your XHTML is done using the w3c standard only. It may seem as irritating initially but definitely helps to render your web page in multiple web browsers correctly. It also helps Search engine spiders.
- Restrict HTTP requests
- Http requests are sent by the browser to the server on every occasion a request of a page is initiated. For instance, your web page includes 3 large images. The first request ensures the page HTML will come. Next, the browser reads HTML code to display on the screen to check that there are 3 links. Here it is the images and 3 more requests that need to be sent to get images. Thus, in total 4 requests are sent. Most web browsers follow 2 parallel requests at a moment. Thus, if 2 images are combined, then it will display these images in one request. Here, CSS sprites is quite beneficial.
- CSS sprites, an approach where we can load an image in one go and display a specific location on that image at a specific place and hide the other sections. Hence, if we have plenty of navigation icons as well as small images, we can combine them and use CSS to display the images that we want a specific location on a web page.
- Minify – Like images, JS files contain plenty of white-space and other unnecessary characters that are not useful to run the script. Thus, with help of minify service, you can easily clear these unnecessary characters and lowering the file size. Too much minification make code difficult to read.
- Combine Minify and CSS – If multiple CSS files are linked to a specific page go ahead and just get them to a single CSS file. Lots of HTTP requests will get saved. In addition to that minify the final CSS too.
- Use a CDN
Servers have a tough time to complete the request of large image files, video content to the user. Also, sometimes data packets have to travel across the world before getting inside your desktop. Thus, using CDN, the data packets get dispersed to multiple locations so when a request gets generated the location nearest will serve the file. This will provide relief to the main server from that large files burden. Like LAN is a faster service than WAN. The same idea is applied here.
In layman terms, CDN is a group of servers distributed over several locations to deliver files in a more efficient manner to users. The server opted for delivering the file to a specific user is basically based on a measure of network location.
- Use Caching
- Reputed CMSs including WordPress, Joomla, and Magento allow caching facility. For instance, if php/asp/JSP page gets processed on regular basis then the server will contain a cached copy, thus for any other requests, no need of reprocessing would be required.
Final Thoughts
The tips to improve web page speed are quite crucial to target visitors, boost visibility, and drive quality traffic to the website. All of the mentioned tips will ensure that web page loading speed is quite minimal and the visitor has no choice left to switch to another website. These tips need to be followed during the webpage designing phase and before making it live for visitors.
- Reduce Server Response Time
The other prominent factor to quickly load a website page is the amount of time the DNS lookup takes.
A domain name system (DNS), is basically a server having a database of IP addresses and their related hostnames. Once a user types URL address into the web browser, a DNS server translates that URL into IP address that specifies its position online.
In DNS lookup process, a specific DNS record is found. It is basically like finding a contact number in the phone book.
For instance, let’s say you like to visit the URL yahoo.com. Once you type this into your web browser — but that has no or limited connection to your computer.
The ISP of your device will carry out the DNS lookup to access the IP address related to that URL.
For instance, an IP address like 192.168.1.220, tells where to find the website you’re searching for. This step stops users from remembering long strings of numbers to access data over internet.
Conclusion:
The above-mentioned tips to improve web page speed are very much helpful for those who are looking for their website to rank better. Responsive website design is also a core requisite for internet users these days. Most of the users generally accessing internet service over there phone only. Website needs to be responsive for better online reputation.
