We all know that speed is most important factors for the success of your website. You can do a lot to optimize it and archive great speed for your site. Here you will find the most essential actions you can take to speed up your website.
1. Reduce Your Images Size
A) Don’t use large photos (image) and scale image. It takes browser time to scale images.
B) Use Adobe Photoshop or online services that will reduce the size of your images without reducing their quality.
C) Don’t add too many images to a single page. try splitting it into pages.
2. Gzip compression
“Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip,” says Yahoo.
Gzipping reduces the size of the HTTP response and helps to reduce response time. It’s an easy way to reduce page weight.
3. Reduce plugins which you use in your site
Too many plugins slow your site, create security issues, and often cause crashes and other technical difficulties.
4. Minimize HTTP Requests
According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different pieces-parts of the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render.
5. Reduce redirects
Redirects create additional HTTP requests and increase load time. So you want to keep them to a minimum.
6. Enable browser caching
When you visit a website, the elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage, so the next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.
7. Use a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. Server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity.
8. Minify your codes
Removing HTML comments, white spaces and empty elements will decrease your page size, reduce network latency and speed up load time.
9. Avoid bad requests
Check for HTTP 404 errors and avoid redirects on resources. Monitor server errors and work with your developers to address any repeated errors. Use online broken link checker or use WordPress link checker for free.
10. Combine css and js
Combines all similar files into one, preventing you from having lots of JavaScript and cascade style sheets that perform the same functions. Features allow you to merge CSS and JS, as well as compress old CSS and JS files that you rarely use.
11. Expires Headers
By using expiry header, your web components like images, static files, CSS, Javascript skipped unnecessary HTTP request when the same user reload the page for the second time. It reduces the bandwidth needed and definitely help in serving the page faster.
12. Put css at the top and js at the bottom
Ensure that your CSS file is placed at the top of documents and JS file is placed at the end of documents.
13. Minify css and js
JS and CSS minification archived a 21% size reduction. This can allow your website to load up to 85% faster! Save load time and decrease bandwidth usage.
14. W3C Validation
Make sure the HTML for your site is actually valid. The W3C has a great tool to help you.
15. Avoid external blocking JavaScript
Scripts that don’t need to be parsed in order for the page to load, for instance those that contain code that will only be run after the page has loaded, perhaps triggered by a user event, should be marked async. This means the browser will load the page first and delay parsing those scripts until later.
Here is a list of free tools to test your page load time.
1. Gtmetrix – https://gtmetrix.com/
2. Pingdom – https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
3. Web Page Analyzer – https://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
4. YSlow – https://yslow.org/
5. Google PageSpeed – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/