I still remember the day when I and my cousin used to browse Facebook using a dial-up connection. Broadband ISP were mythical things for us back then. We have introduced to the optical fiber internet connection approximately 5-6 years ago. Technological evolutions are taking place much more quickly than ever before. I am sure that even 10 years back nobody would believe that they would be using YouTube on their own smartphone sitting in their living room over home WIFI.
Clearly, Internet Technology is growing on a scale no one would have imagined a couple of decades ago. Our day to day life is deeply impacted by its influence. One of the main reasons for the popularity of the internet is that it has billions of websites.
Fundamentally, a website is a collection of web pages and they are hosted by a domain name on at least one web server. Users can access any desired website using any of these devices like computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. by using web browsers.
Websites play a vital role in electronic commerce or e-commerce. People now can avail most of the services from their living room couch by accessing the specific service-related website. Whether it is shopping, playing games, buying groceries, repairing vehicles, claiming life insurance, or availing state services, all can be done through the help of websites.
Constantly increasing demand for website uses has forced developers to keep working on how to well optimize the performance of sites. Now you may ask, “Why do anyone need to optimize sites? Aren’t they all the same?”. The answer is, No. Not all the sites and their performance are the same. A well built and optimized site has less loading time. Because website performance is directly linked with user experience, it undoubtedly helps to get more traffic. A survey shows that 79% of customers are unwilling to return to a site with poor performance. Another study illustrates 40% of users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds in loading.
Today I will discuss how to improve website performance over any time period. Hang on there! You must be thinking that it must be some kind of rocket science to do so. Well, I can assure you that it takes much less than that. Stay with me…
HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a format that is used for structure requests and responses between users/clients and servers. HTTP requests are the messages that are sent by a client known as an HTTP request. When there is too much request your website becomes slow.
Right-click on the specific page and then click “Inspect”. There you will find Network Tab. Looking into there you will find how much request your site makes.
Reducing the request numbers your site will load more quickly than before. Delete all the unnecessary images and files, use CSS image script, and also combine CSS and Javascript files. This helps you reduce the requested files for other pages of your website and increase speed.
As you know how much requests your site makes you need to sort out files and codes like HTML, CSS & JavaScript. In spite of being very crucial to your site’s appearance, these files increase the response time of the site. As they add requests each time a user visits the site, it is important to combine them. You can minimize this by clearing unnecessary formatting, whitespaces, and make the code clean. If your site uses more than one JS or CSS file than you can combine them into one.
It is very crucial for you to understand what a DNS or domain name server is doing out there. When a user types site name, the DNS server translates them into IP addresses preventing the hassle of memorizing them. The amount of time this process takes is dependent on how fast your DNS provider is. A fast server reduces loading time increasing the site’s overall performance.
A lot of new site owners tend to choose a cheap web hosting server. They think it to be economical but they are actually not. In a sense, it costs you less but in the long run, you will find a lot of problems. A better hosting server will provide you with some unmatched benefits like better security, less downtime, instant backup. Internet downtime creates a negative impression of the site to its users. A good suitable web server will surely minimize the downtime of your site, increasing overall uptime so that your customers can access your site without any issue.
Premium hosting will also improve site performance by reducing load time to a great extent. There are three types of hosting servers, such as shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server. I will suggest going for dedicated servers because it gives you premium features.
Normally sites transfer lots of data. Some can be small as 2Kb. Others are of 100Gb. Some of the images of webpages are over 100KB. They make the page bulky and time-consuming to load. File compression here can be a well-optimized solution. Without losing quality, reducing file size can speed up your site’s performance.
Some other benefits of file compression are:
1. Less bandwidth is being used for smaller image files. It helps networks and browsers to show sites to the user faster.
2. Less storage space is required by a server. It means you can store more content in your allocated server.
3. Creating a backup of any sort is being easier and faster.
Imagine you are running a successful eCommerce business and there are tons of traffic on your website. Now you are using a single server to host your site which means every single user requesting the same server. These massive numbers of requests make the server slow in processing responses, slowing down the load time of the server.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) can help solve this problem. With the help of CDN, your site is cached on a global network of servers. Basically, when a user tries to access your site, they are routed to the closest server of hosting near them. It helps distribute the traffic accordingly and reduce load time for each user.
Now that you know hosting your files using a CDN will be helpful, you want to make sure you are using external platforms to share your site’s videos and other large files. Videos can easily take 100MB. If you are using a dedicated server, you will not have too much space. Hosting your big size video may harm your website and when too many people are accessing your website videos it may get even slower. So it is better to host your video in third party places like Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, or Facebook.
Don’t just select your website themes based on beauty and outside feature. Most importantly choose your website theme based on its performance.
Often time the theme looks simple and good from outside but is made with complex codes which reduces the website performance.
Run the demo themes properly to see how long it takes to load. Moreover, you should check it through a speed performance checker.
Websites often use lots of plugins and widgets to improve the features of the website. Each plays a different kind of role, which also needs resources and space to run. When they are run they take more space and make your website slow.
So limit your website plugins and widget. Remove unnecessary plugins or use a single good multipurpose plugin to do most of your website improvement job.
Within the single database, WordPress CMS stores messages, comments, pages, and other types of text and encrypted data. Many of these texts are unnecessary and it better to get rid of them. Database Optimization is a very effective way to increase the performance of your website and should be a routine part of maintenance.
These are the best tips to improve your website performance without any hassle. If you are a website owner and want to make it successful this is the things that your website must follow. This will help you gain more traffics and also rank higher in the search engine result page.
If these tips helped you or if you have any queries please leave comments below to let us know.