In this digital age, visitors’ first impressions of your website depend on its quickness. Finding ways to speed up website, a slow-loading website will cost you money, ruin your reputation, result in high bounce rates and less traffic, and provide a bad user experience because most internet users want websites to load quickly.

Hence, high-performance websites have favorable effects on marketing and sales through increased return visits, low bounce rates, more conversions and engagement, and higher rankings in organic search.

Yet it’s crucial to make sure your website is quick and responsive. This article will thoroughly overview some efficient ways to speed up your website and enhance its functionality.

Ways to speed up your website

There are many ways to speed up your website’s work, and we made a list of the best ones. A website’s speed significantly affects the user experience, SEO, and conversion rates. Improving a website’s performance is essential to get people to visit and keep them interested. Here we review steps to take to make a website faster.

1. Test website performance

When developers test a website often, they can see if its performance is getting worse or better. A speed test should help developers determine which website sections are slowing down and where to improve.

There are a lot of good site speed tests that can be used to measure performance, but Google PageSpeed Insights is a good tool for more in-depth testing. Developers can also use Google Chrome DevTools to check how well their site works. The Network tab shows all HTTP requests, how significant the requested assets are, and how long requests take to be fulfilled.

2. Optimize images

Everyone likes pictures that stand out. Images are an essential part of eCommerce sites that do well. Many photos, images, and other visuals on your product pages make them more attractive. The bad thing about using images is that large images take longer to load, slowing your website’s loading time and slowing down.

Compressing images is the best way to reduce their size without losing quality. You can use tools like Photoshop, TinyPNG, or Smush to compress and reduce the size of your images. Even though the process might take a while, it’s worth it.

3. Minimize HTTP requests

One of the leading causes of a slow website’s performance is the number of HTTP requests it receives. When users visit your website, their browser sends an HTTP request to your server to get resources like images, scripts, and stylesheets. Your website’s load time will increase proportionately to the number of HTTP requests it makes. Combining multiple files into a single file and reducing the number of images, scripts, and stylesheets on your website are also good ways to reduce the number of HTTP requests your site makes.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers worldwide that work together to deliver content. Hosting the website on a single server means that queries from all users are routed to the same piece of hardware. As a result, it takes longer to complete each request. Moreover, consumers experience longer load times when geographically separated from the server. In a content delivery network, user requests are sent to the server that is closest to them.

When a person accesses your website, the material is delivered from the CDN server that is geographically nearest to them. Hence, a website’s content is supplied to a user faster, and the website’s overall performance improves. It may be costly, but it will significantly enhance your site’s load time and ease the strain on your web server.

5. Hosting Options

Most people need to put more thought into hosting. People choose shared hosting since they do not want to spend much money. You can’t expect your website to be able to withstand heavy traffic levels if you share server space with other websites. It would be best if you had a solid foundation to achieve your goal of having more and more people visit your website and make purchases. Choose different hosting for each website. 

When looking at hosting, you have three different options:

• Shared Hosting
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated server

Shared hosting is the cheapest option; you can often get it for about five dollars monthly. On the other hand, VPS hosting still shares a server with other sites, but you have your dedicated portions of the server’s resources. It protects your site from everyone else on your server without the cost of dedicated hosting.

With a dedicated server, you have much more space but more work to do with configuration and technical setup.

6. Minimize CSS and JavaScript

If your CSS and JavaScript files need to be optimized, they can take your website to load longer. Combining the CSS and JavaScript files can make your website run faster. These will get rid of any extra code, comments, and whitespace. You can also quickly compress your CSS and JavaScript files using minification tools like CSSNano and UglifyJS.

7. Enable browser caching

Browser caching allows your website to store files like images, scripts, and stylesheets often used on the user’s browser. When the host returns to your website, their browser can get these files from the cache instead of sending an HTTP request to the server. It speeds up the time it takes for your website to load.

Depending on your site’s platform, there are different ways to cache it. For WordPress, you can use W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache as plugins.

8. Reduce server response time.

The time it takes for your web server to respond to an HTTP request from a user’s browser is the server response time. A slow server response time can prevent a website from loading. Use a reliable web hosting service, optimize your database queries, and make your serverless busy to reduce the time it takes for the server to respond. 

9. Database optimization in CMS

Optimizing the database is an excellent way to improve performance. If you use a content management system (CMS) with many complicated plugins, your database size grows, and your website moves more slowly. For example, the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) stores comments, blog posts, and other large pieces of information. Each CMS needs its optimization steps and has many plugins that work with it. For WordPress, think about WP-Optimize.

10. Reduce redirects

When a website redirects, it makes more HTTP requests, which slows it down. We recommend you use them as little as possible or eliminate them. Sometimes redirects can’t be helped, but they should only be used if needed.

Summing Up

Speeding up your site is essential to get and keep more visitors. A loading problem is likely if a website has a high bounce rate, fewer visitors, and bad user experiences. To solve the slow loading problem, don’t hesitate to contact Elior Digital Agency or visit our website at elioragency.com