Constantly increasing demand for website uses has forced developers to keep working on how to well optimize the performance of sites. Now you may ask, “Why does anyone need to optimize sites? Aren’t they all the same?”. The answer is, No. Not all the sites and their performance are the same. A well-built and optimized site has less loading time. Because website performance is directly linked with user experience, it undoubtedly helps to get more traffic. A survey shows that 79% of customers are unwilling to return to a site with poor performance. Another study illustrates 40% of users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Today I will discuss how to improve website performance over any time period. Hang on there! You must be thinking that it must be some kind of rocket science to do so. Well, I can assure you that it takes much less than that. Stay with me…
1. HTTP Requests Reduction
HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a format that is used for structure requests and responses between users/clients and servers. HTTP requests are the messages that are sent by a client known as an HTTP request. When there is too much request your website becomes slow.
Right-click on the specific page and then click “Inspect”. There you will find the Network Tab. Looking into there you will find how many requests your site makes.
By reducing the request numbers your site will load more quickly than before. Delete all the unnecessary images and files, use CSS image script, and also combine CSS and Javascript files. This helps you reduce the requested files for other pages of your website and increase speed.
2. Combine Files and Minimize them Properly
As you know how many requests your site makes you need to sort out files and codes like HTML, CSS & JavaScript. In spite of being very crucial to your site’s appearance, these files increase the response time of the site. As they add requests each time a user visits the site, it is important to combine them. You can minimize this by clearing unnecessary formatting, and whitespaces, and making the code clean. If your site uses more than one JS or CSS file then you can combine them into one.
3. Reducing Server Response Time
It is very crucial for you to understand what a DNS or domain name server is doing out there. When a user types a site name, the DNS server translates them into IP addresses preventing the hassle of memorizing them. The amount of time this process takes is dependent on how fast your DNS provider is. A fast server reduces loading time increasing the site’s overall performance.
4. Choosing the Right Hosting Server
A lot of new site owners tend to choose a cheap web hosting server. They think it to be economical but they are actually not. In a sense, it costs you less but in the long run, you will find a lot of problems. A better hosting server will provide you with some unmatched benefits like better security, less downtime, and instant backup. Internet downtime creates a negative impression of the site to its users. A good suitable web server will surely minimize the downtime of your site, increasing overall uptime so that your customers can access your site without any issues.
Premium hosting will also improve site performance by reducing load time to a great extent. There are three types of hosting servers, such as shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server. I will suggest going for dedicated servers because it gives you premium features.
5. Use Compression where Needed
Normally sites transfer lots of data. Some can be as small as 2Kb. Others are of 100Gb. Some of the images of webpages are over 100KB. They make the page bulky and time-consuming to load. File compression here can be a well-optimized solution. Without losing quality, reducing file size can speed up your site’s performance.
Some other benefits of file compression are:
- Less bandwidth is being used for smaller image files. It helps networks and browsers to show sites to the user faster.
- Less storage space is required by a server. It means you can store more content in your allocated server.
- Creating a backup of any sort is becoming easier and faster.
6. Take Benefits from CDN
Imagine you are running a successful eCommerce business and there are tons of traffic on your website. Now you are using a single server to host your site which means every single user requesting the same server. These massive numbers of requests make the server slow in processing responses, slowing down the load time of the server.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) can help solve this problem. With the help of CDN, your site is cached on a global network of servers. Basically, when a user tries to access your site, they are routed to the closest server of hosting near them. It helps distribute the traffic accordingly and reduces load time for each user.
7. Use External Hosting Platforms
Now that you know hosting your files using a CDN will be helpful, you want to make sure you are using external platforms to share your site’s videos and other large files. Videos can easily take 100MB. If you are using a dedicated server, you will not have too much space. Hosting your big-size video may harm your website and when too many people are accessing your website videos it may get even slower. So it is better to host your video in third-party places like Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, or Facebook.
8. Choose Website Theme Wisely
Don’t just select your website themes based on beauty and outside features. Most importantly choose your website theme based on its performance.
Often time the theme looks simple and good from the outside but is made with complex codes which reduces the website’s performance.
Run the demo themes properly to see how long it takes to load. Moreover, you should check it through a speed performance checker.
9. Limit Plugins and Widgets
Websites often use lots of plugins and widgets to improve the features of the website. Each plays a different kind of role, which also needs resources and space to run. When they are run they take more space and make your website slow.
So limit your website plugins and widgets. Remove unnecessary plugins or use a single good multipurpose plugin to do most of your website improvement job.
10. Database Optimization
Within the single database, WordPress CMS stores messages, comments, pages, and other types of text and encrypted data. Many of these texts are unnecessary and it better to get rid of them. Database Optimization is a very effective way to increase the performance of your website and should be a routine part of maintenance.
These are the best tips to improve your website performance without any hassle. If you are a website owner and want to make it successful these are the things that your website must follow. This will help you gain more traffic and also rank higher in the search engine result page.
If these tips helped you or if you have any queries please leave comments below to let us know.