In today's competitive landscape, it is not enough to create a website, you need to ensure that it performs at its best. Consider your website as an employer that works 24/7. Naturally, you need to prepare it to perform excellently at all times.
Poorly designed or optimized websites are not user-friendly, show slow loading time, are incompatible with cross-device and cross-browser, etc. As a result, the site's bounce rate increases and the conversion rate decreases. Plus, all of this inspires a negative impression of your brand. Take a look at the following sections to find out how to improve your website performance. And if you find these to be too technical, consider hiring professional website design services instead of trying amateur hands. Anyway, without further ado, let's dive in.
Key Steps to Improve Your Website Performance
Reduce HTTP requests
Web browsers use HTTP requests to obtain different elements of a page, such as images, scripts, and style sheets. Each request has an overhead in establishing a connection between the web server and the browser.
Additionally, browsers typically have a limited number of parallel network requests. Therefore, if you have many requests backed up, some of them may be blocked.
The first step is to eliminate unnecessary requests. Consider the minimum number of HTTP requests required to render a website. Then, load only essential external resources.
You should also remove any irrelevant images, style sheets, JavaScript files, fonts, etc. If you use a CMS like WordPress, remove unnecessary plugins that load additional files on each page.
After trimming everything irrelevant, it's time to optimize the rest of the elements. We'll get to this later in the blog.
Use content delivery network (CDN)
Content delivery networks use geographically distributed servers. That means the server closest to the site visitors will serve static files like CSS, fonts, images, and JavaScripts.
In general, while serving static files from your server, the loading time increases as users are physically away from the server. When using CDN, the image loading time will remain the same regardless of where the user connects.
Supercharges your site performance. In addition to offering a fast user experience, it also helps anticipate site failures in the event of a traffic flood.
This blog will provide more information on how to improve website loading speed.
Optimize Images
These days, the use of graphics has increased considerably as they convey extensive information in an attractive manner.
For example, websites sometimes use 2x or 3x resolution images so they can display well on high-density retina displays. However, if users do not use a HiDPI display (High Dots Per Inch display, which consists of more pixels per square inch than a normal display), then you are wasting your bandwidth and increasing loading time. Many visitors browse websites using mobile data or from remote locations with poor Internet connectivity. You can imagine how your website will work!
Therefore, compress your images without affecting their quality. Also, use the correct file type while optimizing the image size. For example, use JPEG for images with lots of colors and PNG for simple graphics.
Take advantage of preloading techniques
There are several prefetching and prefetching techniques that you can use to inform your browser what resource is required to render the page before the browser actually needs these resources.
Here are some performance optimization techniques practiced by the experts at any reputed website development company:
DNS preload: is the process of resolving the IP address of a website before the visitor even clicks the link. It seeks to resolve latency issues related to DNS resolution, such as the time it takes for your site's domain name to resolve to an IP address. It can significantly improve the performance of your site because when the browser needs to make a request for a resource, the DNS lookup for the specific domain has already been done.
TCP preconnection: helps the browser set up an early connection before an HTTP request is sent to the server. This includes TCP handshakes, TLS negotiation, and DNS lookups. This eliminates round trip latency and saves time.
Previous representation: This is the process of preloading all the elements on a page in preparation for a web crawler to find them. Preprocessing will send a cached version of the site to present all images, JavaScripts, etc. that are processed statically. Naturally, this speeds up the site.
Preload: It allows websites to maximize performance and minimize wait time by preloading resources that users will need later before making a request. The browser will request the resources beforehand and cache them for future reference.
Check out this blog on how to optimize page speed to comply with Google's latest update.
Reduce time to first byte
TTFB or Time to First Byte is the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte of data from a server. Although it is a server-side concern, it also plays a crucial role in the overall performance of the site.
When it comes to TTFB, the main element under your control is server processing time. Here are some tips recommended by Google to improve TTFB:
- Optimize server application logic to generate pages faster.
- Optimize how your server queries databases or migrate to a faster database system.
- Upgrade your server hardware to have more CPU or memory capacity.
Select the right hosting plan
There are three options for the hosting service:
Shared: Here you share the server resources with other clients. If someone's website receives a flood of traffic, resources will be limited to support their site and the site may experience downtime.
VPS: Here, your website shares the server with other sites, but each site lives in a secure container with resources like memory, CPU cores, disk space, etc.
Dedicated: This is the most expensive of the lot. Here, the entire server will power your website. Needless to say, this is the safest of all.
These days, serverless computing or cloud computing has given a respite from all this. Here, the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand and takes care of the servers. The best part is that it offers excellent scalability.
Minify and merge CSS, HTML and JavaScript files
Try loading CSS and JavaScript in a single request for each. You can achieve this by minifying and combining different CSS and JS files into a single package.
Browsers can receive a limited parallel network request. So if your site needs 4 requests to load, it will be faster than loading 25 requests. Developers use various tools to combine multiple files. That way, they can take advantage of the benefit of a single package during deployment.
While minimizing or optimizing the size of CSS and JavaScript files, remove and shorten symbols in the source code. First, minify the CSS and JavaScript files and then merge them into individual packages.
These are some of the proven ways to increase the performance of your website. Try them and see the difference they make!
