Only a few things can be as sloppy and annoying as a website that loads slowly despite surfing the internet on a 3G or 4G network.
A slow website hinders the growth of a company or an organization in subtle ways. If you don’t believe this then make your website loading time increase by an extra 40 seconds, then check your usage statistics to see if you don’t experience a plummet in usage.
Your website performance is quite important both for the users and the organization. The organization wants more users flooding into their platform, while the users also want to enjoy using the service. But the users wouldn’t be there in the first place if your page loads slowly.
Looking at the weight website performance carries, we can say that it has its worth in gold. You’ll learn about the possible tweaks you can make to your website to improve its performance and specifically reduce its loading time.
The Ideal Measurement of a Website Performance
There are specific benchmarks your site has to meet when considering speed. Hence, the question of how long should a website load to determine if it’s excellent performance is a reasonable one.
Ideally, a standard quality website shouldn’t take more than three seconds to load. Only quite a few have been able to meet this benchmark, but this doesn’t mean it is impossible to decrease your loading time to three seconds.
You should try setting a goal; a realistic one, on how many seconds you’ll like your website to take before loading—five to ten seconds is a good one.
With a target load time in mind, you can proceed with the rest of the article and see how you can work towards that goal.
Go Mobile
Go mobile in this case means building your websites by considering mobile users first. The tables have turned; the web ecosystem has changed from an era where building sites for desktop users with little concern for mobile devices were the norm, and it’s now the other way round.
With recent trends towards improving website performance, you should start building your websites for mobile devices first, then scale up to desktops and tablets. With this, you tend to reduce the number of dependencies for your website which in turn reduces the loading time.
Additionally, make use of mobile website auditors to score how mobile responsive your website is.
External Requests
External HTTP requests is a contributing factor to the speed of your website. If your websites depend on files that are existing on an external domain, it’ll need to fetch them every time it loads thereby reducing load time.
To improve website performance, try reducing the number of external files the site depends on; make use of CDN services or caches to store the files locally on the users’ devices, so the site doesn’t need to make any HTTP requests every time a user visits your websites.
In a nutshell, try to reduce external HTTP requests; it improves your website performance.
Minify Your Files
Make use of minification techniques to compress your CSS, JS and HTML files. Minification reduces the size of your files, making them fetch faster without increasing the load time, thereby improving your website performance.
Sites like JsCompress, CssMinifier, and HTML-Minfier can be used to minify your files.
Optimize Images
Taking a brief look at some websites; their text contents load pretty fast, but images take quite a while to load which is usually as a result of the image quality and size.
To improve your website performance, reduce image size and quality. There are websites that provide this service for free such as TinyPNG. Also make use of image formats such as PNG, JPEG to reduce the weight of images.
Hosting Service
Check your hosting service to see how it affects your website performance and load time. If you are making use of a shared server, don’t expect too much, because you are sharing the resources of that server with other clients.
However, the quick fix to this is to opt-in for dedicated hosting. Be the king of your server; this way, your loading time will reduce, and contents get delivered pretty fast to users. You are thereby improving your website performance.
Conclusion
Additionally, install the lighthouse extension to carry out a test on how fast or slow your website performance is. It also indicates areas that cause a delay in loading time which you can improve on ostensibly.
Many factors affect website loading time and performance. However, the above tips are the most common ones that affect website performance. Try checking them and make sure you attend to them the right way.