6 min read (average read time)
Internet users today have no patience for websites with low loading speed or poor performance.
According to a study, around 50% of the web users expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and in case the website takes more than three seconds, they tend to abandon the site.
However, by collaborating with the right, affordable website design service provider, you can do a lot of things to speed up your website loading time. From reducing the sizes of images, using video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, and reducing the number of plugins used on your website to minimizing the HTTP requests, the right team can help boost your website performance.
Let's walk through five ways you can make your website speed faster.
An HTTP request is made for different parts of your webpage, like the stylesheets, images, and scripts. So, it means the more components on your page, the longer it will take for the page to load. Besides, according to Yahoo, the 80% of the load time of a webpage is spent on downloading different on-page components.
Browser's Developer Tools on Google Chrome will show you how many HTTP requests your website makes. Make sure to look through the list and reduce the number of requests to speed up your site. You can minify the files by removing unnecessary formatting, code, and whitespace, and combine multiple files where possible.
After you minify and combine some of your webpage files, you can also optimize how they load on the page. You can load scripts like CSS and JavaScript in two ways, synchronously and asynchronously. In case your scripts load synchronously, it means they load one at a time, in the same order they appear. Whereas, loading asynchronously implies that some of the scripts can load simultaneously.
When you load files asynchronously, it speeds up your website loading time. Besides, you can also defer large files like JavaScript to ensure that the rest of the webpage content loads simultaneously. If you have a WordPress site, you can also use the WP Rocket plugin to enable deferred JavaScript loading.
A lot of website owners look for the cheapest option available when it comes to hosting. Even though that's often enough for the time being, soon they are likely to need an up-gradation as they get continue getting more traffic.
This is not the right time to make cutbacks. Get the hosting platform that you can trust. There are three different options available that you can consider for your site hosting:
Shared hosting would be the cheapest option available, and it's operational for low-traffic sites. With VPS hosting, you are still sharing the server with other sites, but you have a separate dedicated portion. Whereas dedicated hosting is having your own server, no sharing, you have more space for resources, and you are also responsible for its maintenance. Make sure to choose the right option for your needs and traffic level.
When someone visits your website, the elements of the page are stored on their hard drive in a cache or temporary storage. It means the next time they visit your site browser can load the page without needing to send a new HTTP request to the server.
This can speed up your website loading time, as every time the visitor opens the site, the components that are stored in the user's cache don't need to be downloaded again. If you have a WordPress site, you can use W3 Total Cache to enable caching.
When trying to increase your website loading speed, you want your professional and affordable website design service provider to run a compression audit. It is in your best interest to get your files as compressed in size as possible without compromising on the quality. The smaller your files are, the faster they can load. Webpages with a lot of images and other content can go beyond 100KB in size and result in making the page bulky and slow.
You can use a platform like GIDNetwork to run a compression audit and have your team enable the compression. This happens to be one of the easiest ways to reduce your website load time and standard practice of website design and development companies.
Improving your page load time can be a challenging task, especially if you don't have affordable web design services backing you up. Leveraging faster site speed can bring a significantly positive impact on your overall website performance. While there are several ways to improve your website speed, it is crucial to understand that you don't have to implement all of them today. Make sure you check your website's speed regularly and focus on high-impact factors to ensure your website is always in great shape.