If you’d like your website to load quickly, you can use several best practices to speed up your website. These techniques include page caching, reducing the size of your CSS and JavaScript files, and using CDNs to deliver the same code in fewer files. To get the best results, you should test your website from various locations, and then use those results as a benchmark for your efforts. From there, you can work to increase those results.
Page caching
When a visitor requests a page, the server may reduce the load on the server by serving it from a cached version and that’s how to improve website performance. Fetching content over a network is expensive and slow, and when a response is large, it requires many roundtrips between the client and server. It also requires significant data costs for the visitor. Page caching can improve performance dramatically for static websites.
Scripts often add or restyle the document and need to be loaded at the end of each request. When this happens, the browser will want to avoid causing concurrent requests, which can cause errors. Scripts that can be loaded without rushing will reduce page load time. Some caching plugins even offer tools to adjust asynchronous ad code insertion. This is done on the code level and reduces HTTP requests.
Reducing the number of JavaScript and CSS files
A good way to improve the loading speed of your website is to reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files you use. These two code libraries are typically a large part of your website, and are responsible for up to 15% of the overall page weight for desktop and mobile browsers. A single page can take up to 400 KB to download on a desktop, but that amount drops to just 360 KB on a mobile device. In addition, the first time a browser opens your page, it transfers 14 KB of data. By combining these two files, you can greatly reduce the size of your website.
Another simple way to optimize the size of your CSS and JavaScript files is to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN allows your website to distribute its load over multiple locations that are closer to your users. Most developers don’t realize that they’re wasting precious bandwidth by not activating Gzip compression, which can reduce CSS files by up to 60%. HTTP/2 is another way to improve your website’s loading time. This technology sends data in a smaller binary format, reduces headers, and allows you to send multiple files over a single TCP connection.
Using CDNs
Using CDNs is one of the best ways to speed up your website, as they can minimize the load on your hosting server. With a shared hosting server, you might find that the traffic spikes can slow down your website. CDNs work by creating a separate service road for your website’s content, allowing your website to load faster and without straining your hosting server. In addition, CDNs can handle more requests than a single hosting server, which can be problematic if the load on your server is high.
A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers used to deliver content. By using a CDN, your website can receive high-quality content faster. Not only will this boost your user experience, but it will also improve your SEO. As you may know, Google has included loading time into its evaluation criteria. The faster your website loads, the better, as it will improve your SEO score and increase your customer satisfaction.
Optimizing images
When creating an online portfolio, you can use the benefits of image optimization to make your portfolio look its best. While reducing the size of the images is the first step, it is also necessary to use the right file format. PNG, for example, produces higher-quality images. But it also has a larger file size than JPEG. Another important aspect of image optimization is storing the images in the cache of the user’s browser, or using a proxy server to store the files on a website. This way, images are easily accessible and load quickly.
Unoptimized images are large and take longer to load. Visitors will quickly abandon your site if they cannot access it. Inadequate page-load speed also affects SEO. Google penalizes websites with slow page-load speeds. However, it is possible to make your images smaller and still maintain the quality that visitors expect. By following these tips, you can optimize your website’s images and improve your website’s speed and performance.