Your website is the online identity of your business and the website load time can make or break your business. A slow loading website might scare the customers away!
Apart from displaying relevant search results for the respective keywords, another prominent goal of search engines is to provide a suitable and visually appealing experiencing to the online surfers. Therefore, a website must have relevant content, fast page load times, efficient web pages that are not script-laden and easy website navigation.
Is your website slow? Have a look at the 15 factors mentioned below; you will surely get a suitable solution for your website!
Server-side Fixes
If your website is slow, don’t blame the service of the web hosting company, blame the server. It is important to have a web hosting server with suitable hosting configurations. The tips mentioned below are related to your server, if corrected, they can reduce the website load time to a significant extent.
Getting More Cache
Proper expiration of headers will enable the stored images to pre-load when a visitor browses your website. This is possible because the pictures are already stored in the memory-bank. You will need .NET or Apache manipulation for doing this task.
Keepalive Checking
‘Keepalive’ is a message that is sent between the server and the device in order to check operations of linkage. This action prevents the links from getting broken. In case any of the links of your website are broken, any other data requests will be rerouted without any intimation. Basically, there are two keepalive commends : TCP and HTTP.
Enabling Gzip Compression
Decisions made by the front-end programmers are crucial for website page load times. Gzip compression is one of the most effective methods of server compressions. If you have a cPanel hosting account, simply login to cPanel and enable the Gzip compression.
Caching The Landing Page Redirects
Cacheable redirects are generally useful for the mobile web servers. This is because if you browse a website through a mobile browser, the data of website.com will be sent to m.website.com. You can set caching duration for 1 day and cache controls to private for making sure that only the mobile users will receive the redirects.
Use Of Content Delivery Network
All the WordPress users can use the W3 Total Caching plugin while the others have to use a content delivery network. You can opt for any of the free or paid content delivery networks for efficient content procurement.
Content Fundamentals
Restrict The Redirects
If you have moved your website multiple times, redirecting the traffic to the new sources is important. With the number of redirects, the number of HTTP requests will also increase and increased number of HTTP requests will make your website slower. Avoid using a large number of redirect links in your content and also restrict the maximum redirected domains to the minimum.
Query String Removal
It is a great idea to keep the question marks out of the query as they are not cacheable. Use question marks only for the resources that are dynamic in nature.
Meta Character Sets
Setting the character sets in your HTTP Meta tags appropriately will speed up the browser interpretation and enable correct loading of characters mentioned in the tags. Joomla and WordPress might use different PHP variations; however, HTML is easier to read and quick in terms of loading in comparison to any other dynamic scripting.
Minimize Coding
Believe it nor not, useless empty elements and white spaces consume KB’s and this directly contributes to extended page load times. If you are using any CMS platform like WordPress, you will find plugins to optimize your website code.
Check And Remove Bad Requests
Large number of 404 errors are created through broken URL requests. Remove these 404 errors by detecting the broken links through online checkers like WordPress link checker or Broken link checker.
Pictures And Style Sheets
This is probably one of the wider areas that causes a delay in page load times. Your images, Java and CSS coding play a crucial role when various syntaxes are called through the browser. Below mentioned are some important tips that will keep scripting and imagery working on the fly:
Image Optimization
Many images on the website contain useless calls, for instance, an image might contain many lines of <img> code or unnecessary sizes. You will come across great benefits in optimizing images so that your website performs faster. Image optimization can be easily done through deep line checking of image through the web page source code.
Restrict Java, Use High Cascading
Programming your website correctly in accordance with the W3C standards is all about following simple script location rules. You should always restrict the Java coding to the minimum as Java calls take a long time. The initial loads of your website can be accelerated through placing cascade style sheets first in your heading.
Image Sizing
Specific image dimensioning will also help the browser in finding irreplaceable coding. Make sure that a uniform size of images is used throughout the website.
Keep in Mind…
While making any website modifications, you should have efficient maintenance pages set up. As a result of this, a temporary redirect will be created that you can find at a relevant place. Create backups of your current website at regular time intervals. There is no need for you to get into any complicated stuff for speeding up your website, implement the tips mentioned in this article and make your website load faster.
