6 Tips On How To Increase Your Website Speed

Your website represents you as an organization, a company, or even an individual on the Internet; it says a lot about who you are, what’s important to you, and most importantly determines if you are a reputed company that I want to associate myself with. If you are a business of any size, it becomes very important to share your information with your visitors efficiently and quickly. Technically, this is known as “load time”. When a user lands on your webpage and how quickly it’s all loaded determines how fast or slow your page speed is. Yes, yes we have all been in that situation where we get frustrated when a website takes forever to load and we look elsewhere. This is certainly not the experience or message you want to send to your new or existing visitors that come to your website.

What actually is website load time?
The load time of a website is related to the request generated on a web server to open your website. It’s related to HTTP requests sent to the server and the longer these objects take to supply, the slower a website will load. Some examples of HTTP requests are loading CSS style sheets, loading scripts, loading images & loading HTML. The load time of a website plays a very crucial role in that it saves your visitors time, prevents them from leaving due to frustration but also plays an important role for Search Engine Optimization.

Below are some useful tips through which you can increase your website speed:

Utilize Browser Caching
Browser caching allows a browser to remember that your webpage has already been loaded before. When a user visits another page within your website, or goes somewhere else and comes back, it does not have to go and get your CSS file again as it’s already remembered that it’s been here before. This will allow your web page to load much faster for your users and decrease the load time of your website.

Specify Image Dimensions
Your browser begins to provide a page before the images are loaded. When you are specifying the image dimensions it helps in decreasing the load time. If no attributes are specified, your browser will re-travel once the images are transferred. For this, you must define the height and width tags details in the <img> elements.
Optimize Images
For better page speed, your webpage should use JPEG format or the JPEG file format as they are light weight and multi-browser compatible. As a result it will take less time to download it from a web server and decrease the loading time of your website.

Put CSS At The Top & JS At The Bottom
Generally, we call our Stylesheets and Javascripts at the beginning of our webpage, so the HTML parser (scanner of markup language) takes some time to understand your scripting code. If you put your JavaScript files at the end of a web page, it will take less time to load on your screen (browser) and therefore will decrease the load time of your website.

Avoid Bad Requests
To reduce the load time of your webpage you need to minimize your 302 / 301 redirections which generate unnecessary HTTP requests on a web server. Broken links also generate unnecessary HTTP requests on a web server, so you need to remove these broken links. This will also help you decrease the load time of your webpage significantly.

Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
To speed up a webpage you should try to send less query strings / URL parameters. This will allow the web server to revert back quickly and decrease the load time of your website.

Summary
If you make these simple modification to speed up your website, you can see a serious impact on the amount of leads you generate, the amount of time users spend on your site and it will also have a positive effect on your Search Engine Optimization rankings. The bottom line is that user’s want information quickly and if you don’t give them what they want, when they want it, they will look elsewhere. We hope these simple tips on how to increase your website speed has been helpful and allows you to “speedily” achieve your goals. If you are looking for a detailed audit or any advice on how to fix any page speed problems you may have, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.