Having a fast website is crucial these days. Website speed refers to how quickly a website loads and displays content to the user. Studies show that even a 1-second delay in page load time can cause a 7% reduction in conversions. With website visitors expecting near instant load times, slow sites lead to unhappy users who will quickly click away.
Luckily, there are several ways to improve website speed and provide a smoother experience for visitors. In this article, we’ll explore some top tips to speed up your website. Follow these suggestions and you’ll be on your way to faster load times.
Audit Your Site
The first step is conducting a thorough audit of your website. This will uncover any issues that are slowing things down. Analyze page load times to see how your site is performing. Are there specific pages that are unusually slow? Use online tools like PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest to measure your site speed and reveal optimization opportunities.
Check your site on both desktop and mobile to ensure a fast experience across devices. Mobile load times are especially critical with the rise in mobile browsing. Review your site architecture as well. A streamlined information architecture with minimal subpages and simplified navigation can improve speed.
Optimize Images
Images often account for the majority of webpage file size. Unoptimized images result in massive slowdowns. Start by removing any unnecessary images from your site. Scale down image dimensions to the lowest size that still looks good. Use image editing tools to compress files and reduce file size.
Enable lazy loading for images, so they only load as they enter the viewport. Convert large images like photos to next-gen formats like WebP and JPEG 2000 for dramatic file size reductions. Use responsive images, generating multiple resized image files. Serve smaller image versions to mobile devices, avoiding unnecessary large downloads.
Minify Resources
Minification removes whitespace and other unnecessary characters from code to decrease file size. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code throughout your site. This reduces the number of bytes browsers have to download. There are a number of minification tools available, like HTML Minifier and CSSNano. Many content management systems also have built-in minification. Just be sure to keep an unminified copy of your code for debugging purposes. Minification makes code harder to read and edit later on.
Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching stores assets locally on a user’s device, eliminating extra downloads for repeat visits to your site. Set future cache expiration dates for static assets like images, CSS and JavaScript files. This allows the browser to retrieve cached copies, rather than downloading fresh assets.
You can configure caching settings through your web server configuration or via HTTP headers. Just be sure to invalidate the cache and update expired resources when you make website changes. Caching provides huge web performance benefits for repeat visitors to your site. But it can also cause problems if not implemented properly.
Optimize Database Queries
Inefficient database queries can choke up your backend and delay page loading. Profile database operations to identify poorly performing queries. Look for ways to optimize slow queries by adding indexes or restructuring joins. Enable database caching to return query results faster.
Systems like Redis and Memcached can quickly return cached query results without hitting the database. Use tools like lazy loading and infinite scroll to only load the database content needed for the current page view. Avoid hitting the database with extra unnecessary queries. Make sure your database structure is optimized as well. Normalize data to eliminate duplication that slows down queries. Partition tables and spread data across multiple database servers for improved performance at scale.
Enable Compression
Compressing resources saves bandwidth and reduces the number of bytes sent over the network. This makes pages load much faster for users. Use gzip compression on textual assets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON. Image formats like JPG and PNG are already compressed, so focus on compressing text-based resources.
Enabling compression is generally a simple checkbox in server or application settings. Most CDNs also compress assets by default. Just be careful not to compress the same assets twice, as this can actually increase file size. And avoid compres
sing encrypted resources, which are already compressed.
Upgrade Hosting Infrastructure
Your website is only as fast as its hosting environment. Upgrading to a faster web host or content delivery network can dramatically improve site speed. Switch to a hosting provider with global CDN support, putting content closer to visitors for faster delivery speeds. Look for providers with high-end server hardware and network connectivity.
For more power, move to the cloud and leverage services like Amazon CloudFront. Cloud hosting horizontally scales to handle traffic spikes easily. If on WordPress, switch to a managed WordPress host optimized for speed. Flywheel, Kinsta and WP Engine offer well-tuned hosting for top WordPress performance. Migrating infrastructure takes effort but delivers huge speed improvements that directly impact conversions and revenue.
Leverage Browser Caching
The browser cache allows web pages and assets to be stored locally so that repeat visits are faster. Leveraging browser caching properly is critical for web performance.
Set cache headers to allow resources to be cached:
# Cache images and other static assets for 3 days <FilesMatch “.(ico|pdf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css)$”> Header set Cache-Control “max-age=259200, public” </FilesMatch> # Cache HTML and text assets for 2 hours <FilesMatch “.(html|htm|txt)$”> Header set Cache-Control “max-age=7200, public” </FilesMatch>
Version files referenced in scripts and links so cached copies are invalidated when resources change.
Disable caching during development, use tools like Chrome DevTools to disable caching while testing.
Test your caching headers to ensure resources are cached efficiently for users. Browser caching is a key factor in optimizing web performance.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) serves assets from data centers around the globe, providing faster load times for global users. Using a CDN offloads traffic from the origin server. Commonly used CDNs include Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, and StackPath. Find a CDN provider that offers services matching your needs and budget.
To set up a CDN, create an account with the provider. Point your DNS records to the CDN PoPs. Upload assets to the CDN platform or use origin pull to cache files automatically. Ensure optimal coverage by caching all static assets including images, CSS, JS, and fonts on the CDN. Follow best practices from your provider for optimal asset caching and distribution. With assets loading from the edge, CDNs can dramatically speed up site performance. They also improve uptime and provide DDoS protection.
Defer Offscreen Images
Images outside the visible viewport still load on page load, delaying rendering and decreasing speed. Deferring offscreen images improves user experience.
Use the loading attribute to lazily load images:
<img src=”image.jpg” loading=”lazy”>
This defers offscreen images until users scroll near them. For even faster performance, switch to JavaScript lazy loading using a library like LazySizes. This allows finer-grained control like lazy loading responsive images. Test scroll speed and rendering to ensure images load at the right time as users scroll down the page. Lazy loading is key for image heavy sites.
Reduce Redirects
Redirects introduce additional network round trips that can delay page loads. Eliminating unnecessary redirects improves speed. Review your site for chained redirects which go through multiple URLs. Replace these with direct redirects to the target URL.
Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred URL when multiple exist, avoiding unnecessary redirects between URLs. Shorten URLs and folder structures to avoid overly long redirects. Move pages out of sub-folders into the document root when possible.
Remove redundant top-level redirects from old domain names or URLs. Implement 301 redirects at the web server level for efficiency. Testing tools like Pingdom and WebPageTest flag redirect chains impacting performance. Streamlining redirects is an easy way to gain speed boosts.
Optimize Your Code
Sloppy code can drag down page load times. Carefully optimizing your HTML, CSS and JavaScript improves performance.
- Minify code by removing whitespace, comments and unnecessary characters.
- Avoid @import in CSS and concatenate files. Break CSS into smaller files loaded on different pages.
- Put JavaScript at the bottom of pages to allow progressive rendering. Defer non-critical scripts.
- Remove duplicate scripts and stylesheets loaded across pages.
- Avoid large JavaScript frameworks when simpler libraries will do.
- Use efficient selectors and avoid overqualified CSS rules.
Code optimization requires meticulous analysis of frontend assets. But efficient code provides some of the largest speed gains.
Choose Lightweight Third-Party Scripts
Third-party scripts from analytics tools, social media and embedded content introduce overhead. Choose lightweight options and implement them efficiently. Replace heavy scripts like Shareaholic with simpler social sharing buttons. Use lightweight analytics like Simple Analytics or Plausible instead of Google Analytics.
Load third-party scripts asynchronously using async or defer to prevent blocking page rendering. Or load them at the end of the body. Set optimal caching policies for third-party scripts stored on external CDNs for performance. Review third-party scripts regularly and remove any unnecessary ones. Streamlining external assets improves frontend efficiency.
Optimize Server Response Times
Slow server response times negatively impact overall site speed. There are several ways to optimize the backend for faster response times.
- Upgrade to faster server hardware like SSD storage for static assets and content.
- Enable server caching using Redis or Memcached to return results faster.
- Use a reverse proxy cache like Varnish for static resources not modified frequently.
- Enable compression on responses using gzip or Brotli encoding.
- Set caching headers on server responses to allow browser caching.
- Load balance across multiple servers to handle more traffic at higher speeds.
Delivering server responses faster prevents avoidable backend delays. Review your server infrastructure and implement these optimizations for big speed improvements.
Minify HTML
Minifying HTML is an easy way to reduce file size and improve page load times. Removing whitespace, comments and unnecessary characters shrinks files down. Enable HTML minification in your CMS or build process. Most sites generate HTML dynamically, so minify pages on the fly.
Be careful when minifying pages with user-generated content, as stripping tags can cause issues with comments, embeds etc. Watch out for minification issues causing display problems on your site. Keep an unminified version for debugging. Test minified pages to ensure no loss of functionality. Check site speed tools to confirm improvements from reduced HTML file sizes. Combined with other techniques like compression and caching, minifying HTML gives an easy performance boost.
Improving website speed takes work, but delivers immense value. Faster sites engage users better, convert more sales and yield higher customer satisfaction. Follow the tips in this article to analyze and optimize your site speed. Some changes produce dramatic improvements, while others provide smaller incremental gains – but it all adds up.
Test different techniques and measure results. Often it’s the combination of multiple speed optimizations that add up to a high-performance website. Aim for continuous improvement over time. As your traffic grows, website performance tuning will become even more critical. Fast sites succeed!
