Speed Does Matters! And when it comes to websites and blogs, speed is the most critical part that decides its future and rankings.
The loading time of a site is important, quite important. In fact, it is the most important part of website rankings and customer satisfaction. Speeding up your website will help you engage more users, indexing, ranking and most importantly conversion rates.
Optimizing your site's speed is quite necessary for every blogger nowadays. Being a blogger myself, the page loading time affected my rankings in Alexa as well as Google Page Ranks. Most of us initially focus on content, indexing, conversion rate and getting a good rank, but increasing your website's speed is going to help you in the long run.
To help you improve your site's page loading time, I've curated some of the most valuable tips and methods which will help you increase your site speed by up to 46% if done properly.
Undoubtedly, speeding up your website is a serious concern; not just for proper ranking among search engines, but to increase your insight profits and conversion. So today, I'm going deep and will share you some of most practical methods to increase your website's speed and page loading time.
So, here are the seven easy tips to improve your Website.
1. Enable Gzip Compression
Most websites have large size pages (if you're creating high-quality content) about 100-150 kb and up. Hence, they become bulky and often slow to download. Compression is a classic technique to speed the loading time. You can quickly reduce the HTTP request and enable compression by this tool Gzip. Moreover, if you're hosting your blog on WordPress, then there are many plugins available which will do the compression automatically.
Whenever you visit a website or page, all the elements on the page save locally on your device in the form of cache or temporary memory. So the next time you visit that website, your browser would load the site without sending another HTTP request to the server.
HTTP request can increase up to 2 seconds of page loading time, and if properly cached along with most of the elements, website's speed would effectively increase by .9 seconds.
Images, JS, CSS files, media files, etc., all of these resources are cacheable elements. Setting Expires to a period of one week would reduce the HTTP requests and visitors would be able to revisit your website better.
3. Upgrading to a better Web Hosting
Most of the websites suffer the speed issues because of their hosting server. Page loading time, caching process, and the performance of the site, it all relies on your web hosting plan. If you're not satisfied with the services that your server provider is offering, then it better to upgrade your web hosting to a much better and reliable server.
Bluehost India is the leading provider of cloud-based hosting solutions and web services. Recently, I upgraded my hosting to Bluehost's new Cloudsites. It is the latest cloud-based hosting solution, faster and better than their shared hosting plans. With features like Data Mirroring, and integrated caching with NGINX/Varnish Caching configuration. They promise that the performance and speed of the hosted website would be far better than other premium hosting plans.
You can check the pricing, plans and other hosting plans by Bluehost India on its official website. Moreover, they are providing up to 40% discount on the cloud hosting solutions. So, Hurry Up!
4. Reducing Server Response Time
Focusing on the server response time should be the primary concern while optimizing your website. You can improve your page loading speed if you're going to keep your site response time under 200 milliseconds.
According to the Yahoo's research, "80% of the end-user respond time is spent on the front-end". The key to obtaining a faster rendering of websites and pages is to reduce the number HTTP request along with the server response time.
5. CSS Sprites & Minifying
Optimizing your CSS is one of the most important points to reduce the loading time. As we all know, CSS is responsible for all the styling and design of the website and therefore, the speed of the site.
CSS Sprites are the most preferred technique for reducing the number of image requests. Combining all the background images into a single image and use the commands background-image and background-position to improve the caching speed.
Furthermore, Minifying CSS is also an important thing. Avoid including your CSS into the HTML and for WordPress hosted blogs, plugins such as CSS and JS minify will do the job automatically.
6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Optimizing your content is also a way to increase your site's speed. To unleash the maximum speed of your website, a content delivery network is used along with the web hosting to improve. CDN is a system of multiple servers that deliver and host content in a network.
CDN indeed optimizes the website's performance and improves the site speed. Incapsula is one of the major CDNs and when integrated with a premium web hosting, it acts as a cherry on top! Like every other CDN, it is also a paid tool and is a reliable option for improved performance.
When tested with one of my blogs, the loading time reduced from 8 seconds to a whopping 2.6 seconds. With further improvisations, the complete loaded within 2 seconds.
7. Optimizing Images & Media Files
Handling the images and media files on your website can certainly improve your site's speed. Size, format, and attributes are the three peculiar things that one should focus.
Oversized images are slow to load and certainly increase the page speed which ultimately reduces the site's speed. So, here are some of the tips which you can try to improve the speed.
You can read more about the images and optimization
- Best Format: - JPEG images are the best for your blog. They are easy to load and can be easily resized according to your requirements. Try avoiding GIFs, BMPs and TIFFs.
- Image Size: - Resizing your images to medium and small sizes would reduce the loading time by 60%. Various optimizing tools such as WpSmus.it, EWWW Optimizer are present for WordPress hosted websites.
- Alt & Src Attribute: - Adding alt attributes in the image URLs are healthy for both the user and SEO. Images with alt attributes help to index the page faster and affect your ranking. Moreover, using the src attribute in HTML will call the picture directly from the external links and loads the site faster.
So, this was it. Most of the methods can be readily implied on your site, and some require an adequate knowledge of basic HTML and CSS coding. There are other improvisations such as putting scripts in the bottom, reducing cookie size and so on, but the most important ones are listed above.
Moreover, you can always look for help to improve your site's performance and speed. Now, it is your time to help by letting us know about any other practical ways.