Last Updated on September 13, 2024
What makes a website keeping the visitors engaged for longer and support in high conversion rate? It’s the performance of the website. With the emergence of mobile market, speed of a website matters a lot to win over the large customer share. What are the ways to speed up a website? This writing will deal fairly with this topic.
What Big Giants Have Experienced?
According to Amazon’s 2007 stats, load time increased by 100ms had resulted in 1% decrease in their sales.
Google had analyzed in 2006, when Google Maps was launched, that page size reduction from 100KB to 80KB had given rise to the traffic by 10% in first week and 25% in the later 3 weeks.
It’s clear that keeping an eye on the performance of a website is must and this should be incorporated into the main web design process.
Here are some tried and tested techniques to make a website performing better. Read and given them a try!
HTTP Requests – Keep At Minimum
The round trips of the browser to the server should be minimized to enhance the performance of a website. Browser has to download every file being used by a website. Include the CSS files in a single stylesheet. The same should be done for JavaScript and images.
Combine HTML, CSS, JavaScript
The code is usually formatted in an easy to read manner. To do this, some unnecessary characters are included into the code, which may be the comments, white space, and line characters. By removing these unnecessary characters, the file size can be reduced and hence the data that browser downloads. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Image Optimization – Affects Greatly The Web Performance
A browser needs to download the images as well that could slow down the speed of a website. CSS graphics are much better than images in some cases, like for buttons. If it’s important to use the images, then formatting and compressing them without losing quality will help in saving data.
Sprites – You Might Have Heard About That
As minimum HTTP requests are the key to enhance the website performance, each image needs one request to be sent to the server and browser can end few requests simultaneously. The HTTP requests related to images can be reduced by combining several images together.
Although Sprites are tricky to create, but there are many Sprite tools available online to get help from.
Compressing Images
It’s not possible to compress the images if they are larger in number or there is a photography showcase to be presented at the site. Compressing and formatting images can save many data bytes, hence improving the performance of a website. Make it sure that the images are compressed without losing their quality or look. Saving images with tools can result in extra data, which includes color data or Meta data. Smush.it is an efficient tool of Yahoo to compress the image data.
Data URIs – Help Reducing The HTTP Requests
This technique helps in encoding fonts as well as images into the data strings. Hence integrating them into stylesheets and markup. It reduces the HTTP requests of images sent to the server.
Scale Images To Save Data Bytes
It’s better to serve the images in original size, but they can be resized when the same image to be served several times and one of them carries original size. It will help in saving the data bytes. It has nothing to do with large sized fluid images, which are larger than being displayed on small screen. Photoshop is the right tool to scale images.
Enable Caching To Improve Web Performance
Web servers and browsers allow caching, which means storing previous requests made by the users regarding web pages, images, CSS/JavaScript, and cookies. It reduces bandwidth to improve the web performance.
JavaScript Should Be At The Bottom
As a browser needs all the files to be downloaded for displaying the full web page in front of the user. To minimize the load time, the JavaScript files shouldn’t be loaded into the HTML head, but near the bottom. As JavaScript takes more time to load, so keeping it at the bottom, will not affect the loading of rest of the page.
Bad Requests Should Be Avoided At All
A broken link to a website or any request resulting in 404/410 error comes under bad request heading. These bad requests should be avoided at all to enhance the performance of a website.
Go For Content Delivery Networks
Normally, a server keeps a copy of a website and then responds to the request made by any user. The response time varies depending on the location of the user. Content delivery networks work differently, as they store many copies of a website and save them with different servers located in different parts of the world. It means content delivery networks minimize the load time for a website, so help in enhancing the performance.
Get Help From Google Page Speed Tool
Many of the factors described above can be monitored by using the Google page speed tool. The tool provides complete help to track and improve the performance of a website. PageSpeed Insights give suggestions to enhance the web speed after completely analyzing the web page content. If the page load time is reduced, it works for low bounce rate and high conversions.
If you want to get maximum out of a website, you will have to gain the attention of the site visitors. To gain the attention of the site visitors, a website needs to be user friendly and should have low load time. A speedy website makes the visitors staying for longer at web pages and hence more are the chances of conversion.
Are you already considering the above-mentioned factors to speed up your website and to enhance the web performance? If not, then you should start thinking about them; it’s all about making your website highly user friendly. If you can’t do all the things on your own, you can acquire the services of a professional web designer. Do check the repute of the designer before hiring whether he/she could deliver what you are expecting or not.
Check out our previous articles:
- Call to Action Button: What makes it More Clickable?
- Car Design: From the Drawing Board to Production
- 30 Informative Slideshare Presentations for Designers
- A One Page Website – What is it? – Positives and Negatives
- Tips while Designing a Brand Logo
We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!