The quickest way to lose your website visitors is with a slow loading website. Studies and surveys show that if your website pages are not able to load within three seconds, users will abandon the site and find another business. This applies to both current customers and new visitors, and losing out on this traffic can translate to big losses for your business. People have little tolerance for websites that are slow to load, and it is important to do what you can to improve your website loading speed. Read on to learn ways that you can accomplish this goal.
Minimize HTTP Requests
Yahoo states that 80% of your web page’s load time is used up downloading the different parts of your web page, including scripts, style sheets, and images or videos. Each of these elements receives an HTTP request, so when you have a lot of different components, your pages will take longer to load.
First, you need to figure out how many requests your website makes. People who use Google Chrome will be able to use the browser’s Developer Tool to find out. You can go through and reduce the number of requests, and this should help to speed up your loading time.
Minify, Combine, and Optimize Your Files
The most important files are your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files because they create what people see when they sign onto your website. These files can be minified, which is where the size is reduced, and combined. This will reduce the number of requests.
When you minify the files, you can remove whitespace, unnecessary formatting, and code. You can also optimize the way they load on your page. Normally, files can be loaded synchronously or asynchronously. When they load asynchronously, some of the scripts will load at the same time, which will speed up your load time.
Defer the JavaScript Loading
When you defer JavaScript loading, the page will wait to load JavaScript until the rest of the elements are loaded. This allows the rest of your content to load without any delays.
Consider Your Hosting Provider
In addition to these tips for reducing your page load speeds, your server hosting may be slowing down your page loading speeds. There are different ways that this can impact your loading speeds.
TTFB (Time to First Byte): TTFB is how long a browser waits before the first byte of data arrives from the server. Google says that your TTFB should be less than 200 milliseconds. The browser sends the HTTP request to your server, and the server needs to do three things:
- Look up the DNS
- Process the request
- Respond
You can check your website TTFB in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools. Make sure that it is under 200 milliseconds.
Hosting Plan: Often people choose the least expensive plan without thinking about what they need. If your website does its job, your traffic will grow and you need to plan for what you need. You can choose shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated Server hosting, or cloud hosting, and each one has a different set of benefits.
Shared hosting is exactly what it sounds like – you will share resources with other websites that are stored on the same server. If different websites are pulling from the server’s resources at the same time, the result can be slowed speeds. A VPS gives you dedicated space on a shared server, and it has faster loading speeds. Choosing a dedicated server or cloud server can significantly speed up your website load time and make it more reliable because you are not sharing your resources.
According to Hostinger review, choosing a reliable and trusted hosting provider can make a huge difference. Your website speed is very important both for retaining your current customers and for attracting new ones. Choosing a reliable service can make a world of difference.
Make Sure That Browser Caching Is Enabled
The first time a person visits your website, elements from the pages are downloaded and stored in a cache on the person’s hard drive. This way, they can be loaded when the person returns. At that time, fewer files will need to be downloaded.
Reduce the Size of Your Images
Images can be very large files, and reducing their sizes can help to increase your page loading speed. You can reduce the size of the files by cropping the images to include only what you need or compressing your image files. This will help to speed up your website loading times.
Final Words
One of the most important aspects of your website is its loading speed. Numerous studies consistently show that customers have no patience for websites that are slow to load. There are many different ways to reduce your loading speed, which is the best thing you can do to attract and keep customers.