With the onset of the Internet, users have now become more keen to come across a visual image of any establishment or service or product etc. rather than accessing information by visiting. No sooner than later, as and when they wish to avail genuine information, they immediately get on to the website to get the real aspect.
A well-crafted and well-structured website can do wonders not only for your business but it can also push digital marketing to leverage business prospects, but it also helps you in making the information reachable to your target audience in a well-defined manner.
So, having found this that the significance of a functional website is thriving in the Internet market, then wouldn’t it become essential for you to get the website run in an optimized way? Now you must be thinking that how could the performance of a website be increased? And how could it be possible to make the user experience richer through a website? Well! One sure shot way to make users hold on to the website is to facilitate them with enhanced speed of the web page so that better ROI (Return on Investment) can be achieved. The web page speed is an important ranking factor leading to an increase in website traffic, bounce rate with less conversion required. So whether you have an established business or thinking to launch a new venture, having a noticeable online presence would surely be the target and to do so, knowing few fixes to speedup the web page speed will certainly benefit your business.
Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests
As per Yahoo update, usually, 80% of the load time of a web page gets spent in downloading various parts of the web page like CSS files, JavaScript files, images, graphics, etc. So when a web page gets accessed then HTTP requests are raised for every element on the page and thus eventually takes time for the page to get displayed. Reducing the number of HTTP requests is the first thing to do.
For more information you can use Developer tools if you are using a Google Chrome web browser and can see how many HTTP requests are generated. Knowing information from the Developer tools is easy, just right click the web page, then click network tab, there you will find columns – name which tells about the files on the page, the size column will tell the size of each file and time column will tell the loading time of the each file. Another thing which needs attention is to look at the bottom left corner where the total number of requests is mentioned. So reducing the number of requests will definitely speed up the page speed.
Build Browser Caching
As we know that browsers cache several things like CSS files, images, JavaScript files, etc. so that when a request for the page is made in the future then reloading time for the web page gets reduced. To build browser caching for the web pages during website development can be done by writing a code in .htaccess file on the web host. This file controls many aspects for the web pages and make the browser know that what to cache and for what time period. A short code snippet for browser caching in .htaccess file is shown below.
// EXPIRES CACHING //
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/html “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresDefault “access 1 month”
</IfModule>
Asynchronous Loading of Files
Another way to increase web page speed is to optimize the way the files are loaded on the web page. The scripts like CSS files and JS files are loaded in two ways using a synchronous way and the other is an asynchronous way. So when these files get loaded using a synchronous way, then they get loaded up one at a time according to their appearance on the web page. But if they get loaded asynchronously then they are loaded simultaneously. So now we can say that loading should take place asynchronously, so that the speed of the web page gets enhanced.
Adhere to Content Distribution Network
The content distribution networks, also known as the content delivery networks are the networks which help in distributing the load time of displaying the content to the user accessing through a web browser. The copies of web pages are stored in several data centers, which eventually improves the accessibility of the web pages and allow users to access the web pages in a faster and in a more reliable way.
Optimize Images
The images you put on web pages should be in the right file format and should not be larger than what is actually required. Also make sure that the images should be compressed for the web. You can augment the optimization of images by using a performance optimization technique called CSS sprites which combines several images into a single image known as a sprite sheet. So with this, the user can download a single file instead of downloading several files and can display the required image. Now the load time is getting saved as the user is not waiting for several images to get downloaded.
