Research conducted by Google, Amazon, and other companies has consistently demonstrated that speedy loading times for pages are among the most crucial elements for the success of a website. One study conducted by The Aberdeen Group showed that every 1-second delay in loading time caused 11% fewer pages viewed and a 7percent loss in conversions. There are a variety of ways you can improve your website’s performance to ensure more incredible performance. However, here are some easy steps you can take today to boost your website’s performance and load speed:
- Do an easy, no-cost assessment of the speed of your site’s pages
Tools like WebPageTest will reveal exactly what’s taking the longest time to load on your website. Type in your URL for the page you want to analyze and wait for the results to be displayed. The text below is for the home page of the beauty retailer Sephora. There are more than 200 elements on this page. By looking at the left column, you can find out which one is the slowest to load. For example, while images generally take under 50 milliseconds to load, the Facebook plugin takes 182 milliseconds. Understanding what to look for in a page test is extremely useful, and you can learn more about it in our analysis of the speed of more than 300 Magento websites.
- Make sure that all images have been optimized to work on the web.
Use an image editing software like Photoshop or an image resizer for free to properly size your images to ensure that you don’t force users to download large images. To do this, discover the max acceptable image sizes for the web page or blog layout. It generally won’t exceed 800px in width. However, when you upload larger images, they’ll be scaled down.
If you employ HTML tags, such as a height or width specification, you don’t decrease the image size in your web server. It’s the way you display it on the webpage. After you’ve determined the ideal size for your print, you can save it to the same size. When you’re working with an editor for images, you may save your shot at the quality of 80%, which further reduces the size of the file, or if you’re using an online resizer, you can choose options that reduce the size of your file to the desired percentage (we would not recommend saving more significant than 50 percent smaller). JPG, as well as PNG, are the most popular formats for the web.
- Limit the plugins that are installed on your website
Plugins such as Google Analytics provide valuable information; however, they can also delay the loading time of your website. They typically work by asking you to input the JavaScript fragment in your web page’s script (commonly at the top of the page); when users visit your site, they will need to download this remote file before the page loads fully.
Suppose you’ve got several of these snippets, for example, for Google Analytics, one for sharing on Facebook, and another for sharing on Twitter. In that case, Your page will take longer to finish loading. Be sure to check your HTML code frequently to ensure that you require all the plugins on your site.
- Eliminate unnecessary code from CSS files. CSS files
It is important to note that your CSS file has to be loaded before you can view your page; however, when you (and other users) have been building on the same CSS file for a long time, it may contain lots of unnecessary code every space or line adds to slowing down the page!
You can go through the code to see if invisible elements aren’t utilized, or you can use an online CSS minifier that will eliminate any extra spaces and regulations for you. Here are some websites Google recommends for minimizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.
- Cache your pages
When you cache your pages, you can reduce the number of requests made from your website server, which speeds the loading time of your pages drastically. Caching also aids in scaling your site in times of high traffic, like when you’re conducting your email campaign or an ecommerce sale.
To set up an easy-to-use globally distributed caching system, contact us to arrange demonstrations or sign up to try a no-cost trial and our next-generation Network for Content Delivery Network.