You may be wondering, “How do I improve website speed?” There are a number of things you can do to increase your website’s loading speed. These include avoiding unnecessary plugins and themes and checking for updates. You should also make sure that your PHP version is up to date. The more recent it is, the faster your website will be.
Optimizing HTML
There are many factors that affect the speed of a website. First, the browser has to download the HTML document, stylesheets, javascript files, and images. This can take 2.4 seconds or more on a first-time visitor. If you can reduce the amount of components your website downloads, your site will load in less than one second. Moreover, you can also reduce the number of HTTP requests. Using caching on your website will speed up page load times.
Using GZIP, a compression tool, will reduce your HTTP request size. This will reduce your server’s response time by up to 70%. You can also minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to reduce their sizes. These techniques will drastically increase the speed of your page.
CSS
CSS can improve website speed by reducing the amount of data that is downloaded from the server. This is important because browsers do not start rendering until they have received all of the HTML and CSS instructions. This means that the more round trips a visitor makes to the server, the longer the time they will have to wait.
Optimising CSS is only one component of the process of optimizing a website’s speed. Other factors, such as user interaction, need to be considered. Moreover, CSS can also increase a website’s SEO.
Javascript
JavaScript is a powerful programming language that can be used to power up your website and increase page speed. Studies have shown that a website that takes longer than three seconds to load will lose around 10% of visitors. As a result, it is crucial to improve website speed if you want to improve your conversion rates. The BBC found that for every additional second that the website took to load, it lost an average of 10% of its users.
As websites become more complex, developers are using more JavaScript frameworks to make them more visually appealing and functional. However, this means more resources are used, which slows down the website. Ultimately, if a website takes a long time to load, users will quickly abandon it.
Images
Optimizing images can make a big difference to the speed of your website. Images make up more than 60% of the size of a website and are the most common reason for a page to take too long to load. This can impact your conversion rates, search engine optimization, and user experience. Luckily, there are many ways to improve the speed of your website while maintaining the quality of the images.
To reduce the amount of HTTP requests that images make, try removing hotlinks to your images. This will make your server use less CPU resources to load these images, allowing your page to load faster.
Static files
One of the easiest ways to speed up your website is to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers that store and serve the static elements and files on a website. This includes CSS, Javascript, images, documents, and videos. By putting static elements and files on a CDN, your website will load faster and visitors will enjoy a better experience.
CDN providers work by minimizing the number of hops that a website has to take to receive static content. They fetch the content from a nearby edge server, reducing the load on the origin infrastructure. These services also provide additional features, such as rate-limiting, DDoS mitigation, and mobile-specific optimizations. The first step in the loading process of a website is to fetch the domain name of the website. From there, a browser requests the content, which is often HTML pages, CSS stylesheets, and images.
Minimizing code
Minimizing code is a great way to improve the speed of your website. It is a process of combining multiple files, like two CSS files or two JavaScript files, to make them smaller. To do this, you must install and activate a plugin. Minimizing code is an essential part of website speed optimization, because it reduces the time it takes for the page to load. The faster the page loads, the better it will be for the user.
By reducing the amount of unnecessary code, you can reduce the number of files your website is downloading. The process makes CSS and JavaScript files smaller, which helps them load faster and save bandwidth. Minimizing code will only improve the speed of your website if you feed the right files into the tool. It will also help if you use a full-stack observability platform like Atatus, which can help you optimize your site.
