20 Ways To Speed Up Your Website | Practical Tips

Written By Peter L

On June 29, 2021
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For any user, nothing can be more frustrating than a website taking time to load. It is not a surprising factor that the users and the search engines stay away from sluggish sites. Understanding how to speed up web page loading time is among the most crucial things to do because, for the success of a website, fast loading pages are very important as they can influence several factors.

As slow pages are among the major obstacles for a site that converts, they can also be frustrating for the users and bad for the business. This can be a big blow for the potential conversions because your slow times can deter the visitors from returning in the future if they decide to stick around.

There are many website optimization techniques to improve performance to avoid annoying visitors and turn them away when they are visiting your website for the first time. Pagespeedy.io is an ultimate performance plugin that can load your website faster and fix any issues with just a single click. With a faster website, you will be making more money, as you will get a guaranteed page score of 95+ with Pagespeedy in just 2 minutes.

20 WAYS TO SPEED UP YOUR WEBSITE

 

Issues that affect your website speed

  • Oversized images

Large images can impact the page size, and this can slow everything down. The first step to achieve a top-performance site is uploading optimized and web-friendly photos. Finding the right compromise between the image size and quality is the best practice by leveraging compression, scaling, and format.

 

  • Resource caching

When a browser renders a webpage, it needs to download the content that is required to display things accurately. This includes JavaScript, HTML, CSS files, and any image or video on a page. Downloading the assets when the user visits the page may not offer a good experience and seriously affect the site speed. Thankfully, the web browsers can save the content of the visited pages in a local folder known as cache and recall it when required.

 

  • Code compression

 

The browser must read every single line of the code to display a page fully. When the coding practices are poor, this can negatively impact various user experience factors, including page loading time. Plugins like Pagespeedy.io can show the best coding practices to avoid site speeding issues like Gzip compression and minifying code files.

 

  • Server response time

In order to build a fast website, people follow all the guidelines, but still, the pages may be slow to download. The answer may be the Time to First Byte or TTFB, which is an important metric that can measure the responsiveness of a web server. TTFB represents the time from when the browser of the user makes an HTTP request to when the server returns the data’s first byte.

The browser can download the assets as soon as it receives the first byte. The longer time the server takes to respond, the later the page will be displaying. Therefore, it is important to monitor the TTFB in understanding how to increase page speed insights.

 

  • Render blocking elements

Delivering CSS and JavaScript as the render-blocking elements is among the bad habits. The Render-blocking feature is a stylesheet or a script responsible for blocking the page from visually rendering until the asset is downloaded completely. Page speed improvement can be achieved by deferring CSS and JavaScript loading, but you need to know how to reduce page load time in JavaScript.

 

20 ways of speeding up a website

Many factors are responsible for influencing how to speed up web page loading time. Different steps are helpful to increase your speed and offer you an improved user experience. The following are the 20 best practices that can be helpful to decrease your load time and improve the performance of your website no matter whether you try to test it on GTMetrix or Pingdom.

  1. Reduce HTTP Requests

Normally, every web page comprises various assets, including images, stylesheets, scripts, widgets, third-party plugins and analytics codes, etc. The browser needs to make individual HTTP requests every time a user tries to load a page, reducing the speed of a website significantly.

Reducing HTTP requests is a technique that is often used to create an experience of faster website response to visitors. Although it is important to use various resources, these should be kept to a minimum. To reduce the number of requests, you need to combine the stylesheets to fewer files, reduce the script number, use CSS sprites, avoid any external requests, and minimize plugins.

 

  1. Choose a performance-driven website host

 

As hosting is the foundation for any website, the visitor always looks for ways on how to open any website faster. In order for a website to look good, it is necessary for the website to be performance-driven, reliable and must have a scalable hosting provider who can fulfill all the needs of the website.

There are a number of hosting solutions available out there in the market, and all of these web hosts differ from each other in one way or the other. The user should be looking for qualities like 99.99% uptime, fast performance, daily backups, strong reputation, and traffic scalability in a website host.

How to improve website speed

  1. Go for a well-coded theme

One of the major causes of a website delay is a poor-coded theme. It can surely take time to carry out research for the theme and be prepared to spend some money to get a robust framework. This can be another great way about how to speed up web page loading time.

You can look for the well-supported themes that are available in a great number. Other than that, the theme should be updated regularly and must be able to offer different functionalities that can prevent any usage of additional plugins.

 

  1. Use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)

CDNs or Content Delivery Networks can surely be a breath of fresh air for a web hosting provider. These are among the website optimization techniques to improve performance and can host and serve the files, images, and scripts across numerous servers in different locations.

It is important that instead of keeping all of the files in the primary server, CDN will be able to load the data from the nearest server that is closest to the users. CDNs can also dramatically reduce bandwidth usage, minimize the number of requests and relieve the server.

 

  1. Get benefitted with a caching plugin

If you want to find out how to increase page speed insights, then the implementation of the caching plugin can help you dramatically improve your website’s speed. Instead of loading the web page every time the user lands on a particular website, the caching plugin can serve a saved version, thus saving bandwidth and time.

Despite the name, plugins like Pagespeedy.io can do far more than just the basic page caching and browser. Pagespeedy is a high-end plugin that can take on several challenges like DNS prefetching, scripts minification, CDN integration, and database optimization.

 

  1. Reduce any DNS lookups

The amount it can take for DNS lookups is among the major factors directly bearing on how to open any website faster. DNS lookup is known to be a process of finding an IP address associated with a URL.

Reducing the number of unique hostnames is a technique used to create an experience of faster website response. When there are a smaller number of DNS queries, this will cause the websites to load faster by lowering the response time.

Why Is Website Compression Important

  1. Compress the website

It may not take a long time for a website to become heavy and big. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the images tend to swell up quickly. A great way regarding how to increase page speed insights is enabling compression with Gzip.

Enabling compression will be helpful to reduce the size of an HTTP response, thus reducing the response time. You will be required to allow a proper compression module in the web server before enabling it for the website.

  1. Optimize the images

The slowest loading element and the chunkiest part of a website can be an image. Instead of scaling the large image with HTML, you can resize your photos on the website down to the size that you like.

It can be a great idea to keep a list of different image sizes for other elements on a website to ensure that you never upload more than the required pixels. You can also think of compressing the images if you have an image-heavy website.

 

  1. Lazy load multimedia

Lazy loading means that the videos, images, and iframes can be loaded when the users scroll down the page and see them. This technique is often used to create an experience of faster website response to visitors and improve the initial load time of the pages. Earlier, it was being loaded with JavaScript, but now lazy loading can be found built-in the web browsers.

 

  1. Go for fast social media sharing links

Many users are aware that they can include the images on their site that can reside on another website. It is a simple method but may not be a good deal for the person hosting the image. Even though the image is on another website, loading the image can strain the original server and, therefore, steal the bandwidth. Consequently, one can disable hotlinking on a website.

Tips to improve website speed

  1. Put CSS before any script

When you place the scripts and style sheets, it can influence how to speed up web page loading time. Placing CSS at the top allows the browser to load the CSS first; therefore, the users can see the content on the site load. It would help if you were keeping JavaScript closer to the bottom, as the browser requires to parse the JavaScript first before moving on to the next tag.

 

  1. Avoid any self-hosted videos

With the help of WordPress, you are able to upload the videos directly to the server, but this can be dangerous for the overall health of a website, as it can slow down the website drastically. It would be great for you if you kept in mind that this can cause not only frustration but also eat up the bandwidth. Instead, you can use the option of third-party video hosting platforms.

 

  1. Avoid any conflicting or heavy plugins

 

The poorly coded plugins may conflict with each other and, therefore, can damage the health of a website, thus making it vulnerable. Not only do such types of plugins cause security concerns, but they are also responsible for breaking the functionality of your theme and primary plugins. Therefore, update all the plugins and delete the ones causing any difficulties.

 

  1. Delete the plugins that you don’t need

If you are concerned about how to speed up web page loading time, then one of the quickest and easiest ways is conducting a plugin audit. It is worth noting that sometimes the webmasters forget to delete or deactivate the plugins that are not required. When you delete the unnecessary plugins, you save space, and this makes your website faster. It is applicable to all CMS websites like WordPress or Wix.

how to increase website speed wordpress

  1. File minification

A superb way to reduce the number of requests is to combine various files into a single one and then reduce the size of each file. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be the basic candidates for minification, but it can also be possible for other types of files.

 

  1. Optimize your social sharing buttons

It is always good to offer your visitors a seamless experience to share the content across their social media, but there are a number of social sharing plugins that are responsible for damaging the load speed of your website. You can try to self-host the sharing buttons or go for any lightweight plugin.

 

  1. Prefetch the DNS requests

If your website uses external resources, then your browser has to make various DNS calls to load the script. Although this can take some time, if you want to know how to open any website faster, you must be aware that a website’s speed depends on how the domains respond.

 

  1. Reduce any redirects

Having 301 or 302 redirects is quite a normal practice for an owner of a website to direct the people from one page to another, but this can also create additional HTTP requests that may slow your website. Therefore, unless it is important to implement a redirect, you can always keep these to a minimum.

Google PageSpeed Checker

  1. Fix any broken links

It would help if you always kept fixing the broken links as a part of your regular website audit because this is how to increase page speed insights. Not only a broken link leaves your users frustrated and unsatisfied, but they are also responsible for draining your bandwidth that can cause bad requests. Therefore, it will be responsible for delaying your load speed.

 

  1. Optimize your database

Unapproved comments, deactivated plugins, deleted items, trackbacks, and spam comments have the ability to pollute the database. You can eliminate all this by using the best of the plugins available in the market, like Pagespeedy.io.

 

Bottom Line

Website performance is imperative for any business, and there is a proper technique used to create an experience of faster website response to visitors. Although you may find some of the aspects of the process to be quite overwhelming and technical, it is important that you start small and then go up to the more advanced techniques.

First of all, you must try to make sure to evaluate all of your hosting options, wisely choose them, and implement a caching plugin like Pagespeedy.io that is robust. Using Pagespeedy, you will be saving a tremendous amount of time and avoiding any headaches of dealing with how to open any website faster.

Have any questions in mind? Feel Free to comment below.

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