How to Improve the Speed and Performance of Your Business Website

47 percent of consumers expect pages to load in two seconds or less, and 40 percent leave a page that takes three or more seconds.

It should not come as a surprise that improving a site’s speed improves performance. Page speed indicates how long it takes to fully load the site content. In a world where people expect immediate results, it’s better to be faster. In this article, we’ll show you how to improve your site’s speed and performance.

Start by Auditing Your Website

You can test your website’s speed test using a tool such as Google Page Speed ​​Tool.

The speed value and results are detailed for mobile devices and desktops. You’ll also get diagnostics and optimisation options to help you load your website faster.

Host Your Media Files on the Content Delivery Network

This is one of the best ways to speed up your site, saving up to 60% of bandwidth, and even reducing the number of requests sent on your site.

Servers are selected based on the user’s distance from the network. For example, the server with the fastest response time and/or the lowest number of network hops is selected.

Choose the Right Web Host to Speed up Your Site

Good hosts are constantly investing in server architecture to ensure that every site that runs on these servers function at full speed.

Take your time and search to find out which hosts offer the best servers and services. This will save you a lot of headaches in the future.

Enable Browser Caching

When many users access your website at the same time, the servers run slowly and spend more time making the site available to each user.

Thanks to the browser caching feature, the user’s browser can save strategic copies of site pages on their device. This means that your site is not always rendered to every user. A cached site does not have to send database requests every time.

Enable Gzip Compression

If you’ve ever compressed files on your computer as ZIP files, you already know how much this method can reduce file size. Gzip compression works the same way for websites.

Gzip compression can be enabled for a website in the application or at a server level, which reduces the amount of data sent during website implementation.

Minimise HTTP Requests

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests are counted when the browser downloads a file, page, or image from a web server. Web pages may be slow because of too many HTTP requests.

When someone visits your site, they request specific files. Each site consists of a collection of files. A file is required for every element – every image, widget, release button, ad tracking script, slider. This is terrible online. Domains4less NZ suggests that if you really want to increase the speed of your site, look carefully at your website design and make the necessary changes to reduce HTTP requests.

Reduce Image Size

According to the HTTP archive, 61 per cent of a page’s weight on desktop computers is images. Make sure your photos are the right size.

By using new image formats such as WebP and JPeg XR, the image weight can be reduced by 20 to 50 per cent without compromising on quality.

ImageOptim for Mac and FileOptimizer for Windows do a good job. ImageOptim also offers an online alternative that works with any operating system.

Minimise Redirects

Sometimes you need to redirect your browser from one URL to another to see the new URL location, track clicks, combine different parts of the site, or reserve multiple domains.

Redirections trigger an additional HTTP request and increase latency. Keep only redirects that are technically necessary and you can’t find another solution for.

Minify CSS and JavaScript Documents to Save a Few Bytes

During minification, unnecessary characters such as tabs, spaces, comments to the source code are to reduce file size.

Defer JavaScript files

When you defer a file on a website, the browser loads the after-loading of other page elements. Deferring large files, such as JS files, makes sense because they can delay the loading of content.

This step does not speed up JavaScript loading. However, this ensures that the browser gives priority to the rest of the content.

Load Scripts Asynchronously

Business owners have no control over most of the code that runs their website. However, due to marketing and advertising purposes, many third-party fragments are integrated on the site or on all pages such as Google Analytics, other tracking tools, forms, and the like.

Conclusion

Contrary to popular belief, speed optimisation is ideally implemented at all stages of creating a site, but also when the site owners realise that optimising site performance is crucial.

Remember that a faster website leads to better user experience, lower bounce rates, and better conversions.