Why speeding up your website is crucial to its success? A single second delay in the load time of the website can result in fewer page views and high bounce rates. If your website loads faster, then you can enjoy the benefits of an increase in customer satisfaction, higher SEO rankings, better user engagement, and higher conversion rates. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you lose more than 50% of the users before they even browse it. A competent offshore web development company can help you efficiently lower page the load time of your site.
Given below are the top 15 tips & tools to make your website load faster and smoothly
Minimize HTTP requests Using Browser’s Developer Tools
More than 80% of a web page's load time involves downloading of images, style sheets, and scripts. You can use the browser’s Developer Tools to see how many HTTP requests your web page makes and then decrease them accordingly.
Minimize time to the first byte Using Webpage Test Tool
Lower the amount of time your webpage takes to start loading using Webpage Test Tool. The time to the first byte should be less than 200 ms for best results. Website design and development plays a big role in this.
Lazy Load
Lazy Load is a magical tool to reduce the loading time of your webpage. It works by loading images only when they are visible to a user. Lazy load is a fast and simple solution.
Run a Compression Audit using GID Network
It is a proven fact that the smaller the size of your files, the lower the page load time will be. But the quality of the file should not be sacrificed. Use the GID Network Tool to run a compression audit.
Enable browser caching using W3 Total Cache
Whenever you visit a webpage, the data of that page is stored on your hard drive in a cache. Hence, the next time you visit the same page, your browser can load the page directly. Use W3 Total Cache tool for this purpose.
MaxCDN and Cloudfare
Apart from the server that hosts your website, you can also use other networks of servers to reduce the loading time of the webpage. You can choose from MaxCDN and Cloudfare. These are very technical aspects and cannot be understood by a non-technical person. Therefore, outsourcing web hosting solutions is very crucial.
YSlow
It analyses webpages and helps you in finding the reasons behind your site’s high load time based on Yahoo!’s rules for high-performance websites
PerfTool
You can find this tool on GitHub. You get various types of reports to analyze your web page's speed. Responsive web design always has a lower loading time.Minify and Combine Files Using WP Rocket
Minifying a file means getting rid of unwanted formatting, codes, and whitespaces. To reduce the webpage load time of your site, you can also combine different files such as CSS and JavaScript into one using plugins like WP Rocket.
Switch to Faster DNS
Switching to a faster DNS is very important to make sure your webpage loads quickly. The loading time depends on the amount of time your DNS lookup takes.
Google Page speed Insights
As the name suggests, it is a website speed test tool. It grades your website on a scale of 1-100 based on its optimization. The higher the number, the better it is.
Compress your files using Gzip
Use Gzip to compress your files and decrease your load time. The smaller the size of your files, the quicker your pages will load.
Reduce image sizes using Compressor.io
You can reduce the size of the image using the compressor.io tool. It does so without compromising on the quality.
Use External Hosting Platforms
Instead of hosting videos on your own server, use third-party tools such as YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia to do that.
Uptrends
It offers more than 35 locations to opt from while doing a speed test. It can be divided into 2 parts- a waterfall breakdown and domain groups.