Tips to Improve Page Load Times

Many people are looking for ways to speed up your business website. They want to create a lightning-fast website that’ll keep their customers keep coming back for more.

Once you have tested the speed of the website, you can start optimizing it. There are a lot of different ways to make your website work faster and we created the list of the most effective ones.

Almost 50% of the internet users expect a website to load within 2 seconds and will leave your website if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. 80% of users with a bad experience on a website aren't likely to return. Research has shown a strong correlation between website speed, traffic, and revenue.

Tips to Improve Page Load Times:

1. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN's use a collection of web servers distributed throughout the world to deliver the content of your website more efficiently.

2. Decrease code size

Remove unnecessary whitespaces, comments, and empty elements. Use code minifiers for your javascript, CSS, and HTML.

3. Optimize images

Reduce the size of your images as much as possible, make use of JPEG, and use tools to optimize image sizes. Specify image dimensions.

4. Minimize redirects

Minimizing HTTP redirects from one URL to another cuts out additional RTTsand wait time for users.

5. Reduce DNS lookups

Reducing the number of unique domain names from which resources are loaded will reduce the amount of DNS resolutions the browser has to make.

6. Reduce bad requests

Continuously check your website for broken links. Broken links which result in 404 error are all wasteful request.

7. Hosting

It all starts with proper hosting and a great hosting provider. So choose your hosting provider wisely or consider changing, if you're not satisfied.

8. Browser caching

Instead of loading all the elements from the server every time a user visits your website, you can load elements like images from the browser's cache.

9. Gzip compression

Gzip compression is one of the most popular methods for compressing your HTML and CSS files. It is believed to save you around 50-70% of the original file size.

10. Stylesheets at the top

All stylesheets should be placed at the top of your documents. Moreover, it is better to use one single stylesheet instead of many small ones.