You’re on the way to home. Generally, you have a habit of listening to music while travelling. You’ve started playing your favourite music. You enjoy the music and ignore the world.
Suddenly music has been stopped. You give a look at your mobile. Later you’ve encountered an error “Page not found”. Immediately you try to reload the page for a couple of times. Finally, the page is not responding for a few seconds. What you do now? You just close the tab.
Likewise, page speed is important to make your users happy.
If you think the speed of the website doesn’t affect you, then you need to think again and again.
Do you know, 1-second delay while loading a page can lead to
- 15% lesser webpage views
- customer satisfaction decrease to 20%
- 10% less in ROI
Every second matter. Therefore keep a close eye on your page speed. An additional second can leave a negative impact on users engagement and conversions.
Building a fast website is a daunting task. For instance, you’ve no clue ‘what’ and ‘why’ your page is loading slow. The error can occur in many cases such as coding, image size, URL and more.
In order to overcome such situations, you should diagnose and solve the issue as soon as possible.
Follow below tips and improve your page speed and user experience.
Minimize ‘Hypertext transfer protocol’ requests
As per research, 80% of a page loading time is spent downloading various things such as images, audio, video, scripts and more. While an HTTP request is generated for each component. Therefore it can take more time for a web page to render.
Minimize all the HTTP request by using Google Chrome – Browser’s Developer Tools. With this tool, you can get an idea about the count of HTTP requests you’ve with others.
Reducing the HTTP request will load your page faster and effective. Further, you can delete unnecessary media files.
Use ‘Asynchronous’ Loading for large files (CSS & JavaScript)
While loading scripting files such as CSS and JS, you should be more careful. Because these large files can harm your page performance.
You can optimize the files while loading. Sounds interesting right. Scripting languages like HTML, CSS, javascript are loaded in 2 ways such as
- Synchronously
- Asynchronously
If you’ve opted for synchronous loading, every media or file will be loading at the same time. In order to visible on the page.
Files like (CSS and JavaScripts) load asynchronously, few files will be loaded simultaneously.
Therefore loading file or media asynchronously can load your page fast. Also, it can move the page from ‘top to bottom’.
Reduce server response time
What is server response time?
It’s a time period that takes to respond from a web browser. The time begins whenever a web browser receives a request.
AS per ‘Google’s PageSpeed Insights”, the response time from the server must be below 200 milliseconds.
Once you’ve all done, then it’s time to work on server response time (SRT).
- Check your hosting – You should have enough resources to handle users and page traffic.
- Choose your web server carefully – Using Apache is a great option. Apart from that, you can also focus on other servers such as Nginx, OpenLiteSpeed, etc.
- Optimize your web servers – Use ‘sub-optimal’ configuration for optimizing the page.
- Reduce bloat – If you’re running a CMS tool such as WordPress, you need to manage your web page carefully. Daily you add new images, content and other media file to your page. Therefore make sure to optimize the content and image by enabling compression software.
Optimize your database
Ensure that your database store and retrieve data effectively. As a result, your loading time will decrease as a whole.
Do you agree “Slow queries are a primary reason to slow page loading”? Ultimately your server will respond to a request very slowly.
- Rewrite your queries. Thereby you receive the required information. For example, if you’re using loops then prefer joins instead.
- Use file indexes wherever required.
- Update your schema to various objects like tables, list, views to store data appropriately.
Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages
Many small and large companies implement AMP to load pages faster. AMP is implemented by ‘Google’.
AMP is a framework for building web pages for mobiles. It includes
- AMP JS
- Accelerated mobile pages HTML
- AMP Cache
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an initiative from ‘Google’. The ultimate goal is to make web pages secure, easy to develop, enable monetization.
While it executes by making an ‘open-source’ that vanishes unnecessary data, media files and more. In short, web page load instantly. As a result, it allows your users a “streamlined experience” on mobile.
AMP is the most effective approach to improve page speed. In future, AMP will have a great influence on social media interaction through mobile. While introducing AMP, keep in mind of incorporation technique to reduce the page loading time.
Choose the best hosting
If you’re planning to host a website for the first time. You prefer for ‘choosing low price hosting’. Definitely, it’s a bad option. While starting a new website is your first step, thereby you need to update every feature to gain enough traffic.
There are three hosting options are available in the market,
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated server
If you want to increase conversions, then switching to VPS or dedicated is a great option.
Reduce media file size and Enable browser caching
Media files play a crucial role in page speed. These are often large media files, which can frequently slow down the process of the page.
You can’t just post content without media files. Don’t you agree!! However, removing large media files is not a great option. In such cases, reducing their file size can have a great impact on large media files.
When you visit a website for the first time. The element on that web page will be stored on your cache memory.
It means the data is stored in temporary memory. Whenever you visit your browser recognize and automatically load the page. Hence, no additional HTTP request is required to the server.
