How to reduce page load time and speed up the website?

Jaydeep P.

Marketing

With the launch of Google’s AMP project, the debate over web page loading time seems to have acquired a new ground altogether. Everyone seems to be in a maddening frenzy to optimize their site and reduce page load time.

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Answers

Rajesh Rai

Assistant Marketing Manager
To reduce page load time we have to compress images of the website.
Sep 4th 2019 02:11 2 Likes

Brahim A.

APSense Adviser for Social Media!
5 Easy Ways to Help Reduce Your Website’s Page Loading Speed
1. Optimize Images
Images are one of the most common bandwidth hogs on the web.

The first way to optimize your images is to scale them appropriately.

Many webmasters use huge images and then scale them down with CSS. What they don’t realize is that your browser still loads them at the full image size.

For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary.

Scale your images before you upload them to your site, so you don’t ask for more from your visitors than you should.

Take a look at the size difference when we scaled down one of our images:

speed-01-scaling

The second way to optimize your images is to compress them.

There are several free online tools for image compression, such as tinypng.com, that can reduce your image sizes dramatically without losing quality. You can see size reductions anywhere from 25% to 80%!

If you use WordPress, you can use a plugin like WP Smush Pro to compress your images.

2. Browser Caching
Why make visitors download the same things every time they load a page?

Enabling browser caching lets you temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your page.

How long you store the data depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings.

To set up browser caching on your server, check out the resources below or contact your hosting company:

Apache Caching
IIS Caching
Nginx Caching
3. Compression
Enabling compression is like putting your website into a zip file.

Compression can dramatically reduce your page’s size and thereby increase its speed. According to varvy, compression can knock off 50 - 70% from your HTML and CSS files! That’s a ton of data your visitor won’t have to download.

Compression is a server setting, so how you implement it will depend on your webserver and its settings. Below are some resources for the most common webservers. If you don’t see yours, contact your hosting company to see what they can do.

Apache
IIS
Nginx
4. Optimize Your CSS
Your CSS loads before people see your site. The longer it takes for them to download your CSS, the longer they wait.

Optimized CSS means your files will download faster, giving your visitors quicker access to your pages.

Start by asking yourself, "do I use all of my CSS?" If not, get rid of the superfluous code in your files. Every little bit of wasted data can add up until your website’s snail-pace speed scares away your visitors.

Next, you should minimize your CSS files. Extra spaces in your stylesheets increase file size. CSS minimization removes those extra spaces from your code to ensure your file is at its smallest size.

So how do you minimize your CSS files?

First, see if your CMS already minimizes your CSS or if there’s an option for it. HubSpot, for example, already minimizes your CSS by default whereas Wordpress websites require an additional plugin such as WP Hummingbird to optimize those files.

If your CMS does not have a minimize CSS option, you can use a free online service like CSS Minifier to minimize your files. Simply paste in your CSS and hit “Compress” to see your newly minimized stylesheet.

Minimizing your resource files is a great way to knock some size off your files. Trust me—those little spaces add up quickly.

speed-02-minification

5. Keep Your Scripts Below the Fold
Javascript files can load after the rest of your page, but if you put them all before your content—as many sites do—they will load before your content does.

This means your visitors must wait until your Javascript files load before they see your page, and we know how much they like waiting.

The simplest solution is to place your external Javascript files at the bottom of your page, just before the close of your body tag. Now more of your site can load before your scripts.

Another method that allows even more control is to use the defer or async attributes when placing external .js files on your site.

Both defer and async are very useful, but make sure you understand the difference before you use them:

Async tags load the scripts while the rest of the page loads, but this means scripts can be loaded out of order. Basically, lighter files load first. This might be fine for some scripts, but can be disastrous for others.
The defer attribute loads your scripts after your content has finished loading. It also runs the scripts in order. Just make sure your scripts run so late without breaking your site.
All you need to do is add a simple word in your <script> tags.

For example, you can take your original script
Sep 4th 2019 02:28 2 Likes

Prem Kumar

Digital Marketing Specialist
Extra spaces in your stylesheets increase file size. CSS minimization removes those extra spaces from your code to ensure your file is at its smallest size.
Sep 4th 2019 06:16 2 Likes

Sourabh Aggarwal

SEO Manager
To reduce page load time we have to compress images of the website.
Sep 4th 2019 06:50 1 Likes

Amit M.

SEO | YouTube Content Creator
Optimize Images properly, minimize CSS, Minimize JS files properly.
Sep 4th 2019 07:06 1 Likes

Shradha Singh

I am Digitally Active
Below are the points which need to be consider while optimizing page load time:

Enable compression.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Reduce redirects.
Remove render-blocking JavaScript
Leverage browser caching
Improve server response time
Use a content distribution network
Optimize images
Sep 4th 2019 07:08 2 Likes

Fresha Simy

enterpreneur
There are many factors to increase website load speed, you should first check using load speed tools and see the results so you know what needs to be fixed.
Sep 4th 2019 12:05 2 Likes

Claire Smith

Digital Marketer | Web Designer
Optimize your website images or videos.
Sep 5th 2019 00:21 1 Likes

Chris Klow

Sell Your Used Business Phones
Optimize your website speed by compressing images, minify CSS.
Sep 5th 2019 00:24 1 Likes

Xpay Life

Online bill payment
Hi,
first optimize website properly and compressed image , video, css files.
Sep 5th 2019 00:41 1 Likes

Jack Reacher

Digital Marketing Analyst
As digital technologies continue to reshape the competitive landscape, marketers are challenged to stay informed, adapt, and make strategic decisions in a space that’s constantly evolving.
Sep 5th 2019 00:45 1 Likes

Yatin Arora

SEO Analyst
just compress your website images and do check your website loading issues on gtmetrix.com !!!
Sep 5th 2019 01:14 1 Likes

Patrick R.

Developer
use smaller resolution pixel images as possible, optimized your content and java-script as well.
Sep 5th 2019 02:26 1 Likes

Thumualaptop PhuGia

Thu Mua Laptop Phú Gia
trước tiên hãy tối ưu hóa trang web đúng cách và nén các tệp hình ảnh, video, css.
Sep 5th 2019 06:01 1 Likes

Alex Watson

All is Well
Here are 10 simple steps to help you shave off a few seconds from your site’s loading time.
Optimize Caches improve Page Load Time

Ensure that your mobile browser uses local memory to cache resources in order to avoid unnecessary server requests.

Trim Down JavaScript Parsing to achieve Ideal Page Load Time

Parsing of JavaScript by mobile browsers increase the page load time. Optimize the page load time of your mobile site by deferring the parsing of unnecessary <script> tags.

Do Away with Redirects and Improve Website Speed

Redirects usually require extra processing time. Serve the mobile site to the users directly.

Minify JavaScript & Style Sheets to Speed Up your Website

Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality.
Minify all JavaScript and style sheet on your mobile site to reduce the overall bandwidth consumption and improve mobile caching.

Apply CSS3 and HTML5 to Improve Page Load Time

CSS3 and HTML 5 framework are lightweight and make it easier for mobile web pages to load quickly.
CSS3 has features including rounded corners, animations and text/box shadow, which makes it one of the most preferred choices for many.

Minimize Image Size to Reduce Average Page Load Time

It makes sense to optimize and resize images to ensure quick loading time. Remember, high resolution images are heavy and usually absorb more bandwidth and take longer to process.
Keep images under 100kb to achieve the ideal page load time for your site.

Apply AJAX to Speed Up your Website

Applying AJAX will help your mobile site fetch the data from a web server without essentially requiring the page to be refreshed.
It allows your mobile site to quickly load and fill in updated content while the viewer is still browsing through your mobile page.

Use Content Delivery Network to Improve Average Page Load Time

Webopedia explains that Content Delivery Network is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user.
You may use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Amazon Cloudfront to reduce the page load time. Access to a faster server near your user’s geographical location ensures faster loading time for your mobile site.
Sep 5th 2019 06:06 1 Likes

Jack Reacher

Digital Marketing Analyst
My specialization is SEO and driving natural activity, however I have additionally worked in the greater part of the umbrella terms under Digital advertising.
Sep 5th 2019 06:39 1 Likes

Neighborhood Trainers

Finding a trainer is a personal choice
1 Implement your own content delivery network (CDN). A collection of global servers share a website’s static files, such as CSS or JavaScript, and they deliver from the server closest to the user’s physical location. In other words, when a user clicks on a video, the file loads faster because it is distributed from a server nearby. Larger websites implement CDNs to ensure visitors around the world have a much more accessible, fast experience.
2 Use adaptive images. According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images. Start by using tools such as Picturefill or Adaptive Images on your website to save bandwidth and improve page speed for your site. Another option is to adopt new image formats like WebP and JPeg XR—this can help reduce image weight by twenty to fifty percent without sacrificing image quality.
3 Cache, cache, cache. Browser caching stores cache versions of static resources, a process that quickens page speed tremendously and reduces server lag. When a user visits a page on your website, the cached version usually displays unless it has changed since it was last cached. This means the browser saves a lot of requests to your server and improves load speed for your site.
4 Evaluate your plugins. Plugins can bring new functionality and features to your website, but the more plugins your website has, the longer it takes to load. Poor or outdated plugins can slow down website performance dramatically, which could be fixed by removing plugins that duplicate functionality, are out of date or are no longer used.
5 Combine images into CSS sprites. If you have several images on a page, you are forcing multiple roundtrips of the server to get all the resources secured, which slows down page speed. Sprites combine all background images on a page into one single image, which means all images appear when the main “sprite” loads. This reduces the chance of flickering images and a smoother experience for your users.
6 Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers. HTTP requests are simple: they grab a single file, distribute and close. That said, this process is not always fast. Keep-alive allows the web browser and server to agree to use the same connection to grab and send multiple files. In other words, the server holds the connection open while a user is on the site instead of opening a new connection with every request, easing the load for the processor, network and memory.
7 Compress your content. You can compress your content significantly in order to improve your website performance. Popular web servers such as Apache and IIS use the GZIP compression algorithm to do this automatically on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There are even compressor services online that remove unnecessary spaces and characters across your HTML and CSS code.
8 Configure expires headers. When a user visits your website, the website files are stored on their computer so that your website loads faster for them the next time they visit. There is an expiration date in the file header that determines how long these files will be stored on their computer, which is usually set to 24 hours by default. You can configure the expires header so that the files never time out, or you can increase the expiration date so that it doesn’t impact your server and page load time.
9 Minify JavaScript and CSS. By removing unnecessary line breaks, extra space, and so on, you will speed up parsing, downloading and executing. This simple task can cut bytes of data from your page, and every little bit counts. Tools like this CSS Minifier/Compressor can be very helpful in this department.
10 Review your hosting package. If you’ve taken these previous steps and your website is still loading slowly, you may want to consider a new hosting package. On a typical shared hosting account, you might be sharing server space with dozens of other companies, which can impact the speed of your website since a number of people are using the same server. If shared hosting no longer meets your needs, consider dedicated hosting. This option allows you alone have access to the server, or a VPS (Virtual Private Server)—a physical computer partitioned into multiple servers each running its own operating system.
11 You can also try migrating to a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Companies that rely on their website to stream large amounts of content, or those running a browser-based SaaS platform may find that a VPC enables faster, more predictable performance and can cut bandwidth costs up to 70%.
Sep 5th 2019 06:58 1 Likes