5 ways to optimize your website speed
If your website is optimized to load faster, it plays a huge role in higher ranking of your website, as per the google. Slow websites tend to rank lower, and user experience is not good. You don’t really want the users to wait for your website to load. So, in this article, we are going to see top five ways to optimize your website to load faster.
Before we dive into ways to optimize your website speed, we need to check it using a tool. PageSpeed Insights provides a detailed view of your website, and displays score, speed, and files that are causing the website to load slower.
1. CDN hosting
When the website first loads, the server needs to fetch all the required data, and display it to the user. Maybe there are images, videos and other files that needs to be fetched. That takes time and the user is forced to wait. Content Delivery Network or CDN for short, allows you to store data on CDN servers, geographically closer to the user’s location. That way, the files get faster to the user, using the CDN server closest to them.
In addition to faster loading speed, CDN also offers a higher level of security for your website. Since your website is geographically distributed, it provides security to your website.
Why is CDN hosting important?
- Better performance
- Increased reliability
- Cost savings
- Resilience against cyber attacks
Top CDN Hosting Services
2. File Compression
File Compression are used to compress the size of the files, so that the file transfers faster than using the uncompressed version. Size reduction lowers the bandwidth capacity needs.
The webserver where your website files are stored, uses a compression algorithm to compress your files. Browser on the other hand, decompress your compressed files, and then display the pages.
You only want to compress text-based files, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and never the images and other media files.
Why is compression of files important?
- It’s important because it speeds up your website.
- It takes lesser time to load and render your page.
- Compression save bandwidth
3. File Concatenation
JavaScript and CSS files are concatenated in order to reduce the number of requests that occur on the page load. CSS files are minified and concatenated, which reduces the file size by removing unnecessary white spaces.
4. Minify Scripts
Minification is the process by which all unnecessary characters are removed from the Javascript files without altering the functionality. This process includes the removal of white space characters, comments, semicolons, and also the use of shorter variable and function names. This results in a compact file size.
When we write CSS or JavaScript, we write in such a way that is a human readable and anyone having prior experience is able to fully understand when we wrote. For that, we use Tabs and spaces and even comments to help them understand. Computers on the other hand, doesn’t need to know these tiny details. We can minify the scripts. Computer will be able to understand what we want it to do, without using space that we used earlier.
Why is it important to minify scripts?
- Reduces size of files
- Load faster
- Compresses files
Tools to minify scripts
5. Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a strategy to load your assets on when needed basis. For example, if you have a long scrollable web page, you don’t really want to load all of your image assets in one go. This will put pressure on your server and also on your device. Instead, you need to load few of your assets on page load and load the remaining on page scroll.
Advantages of lazy loading:
- It optimizes your website
- it reduces time and memory consumption
- Enhances the User Experience (UX)
- Avoids unnecessary code execution
Conclusion
If your website loads slower, you need to check it for five things mentioned above. Doing so, will ensure that your website loads faster, and users face no latency. An optimized site will always rank higher than the unoptimized one.