Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Website’s Speed

The speed of your website plays a critical role in determining how long potential customers stay on your business’s website. Ideally, your website should take less than 1 second to load. Longer than that, visitors will start realizing that the computer is in control of their actions. For anything longer than 3 seconds, users are 40% more likely to leave.

So, what are some ways to optimize your website’s overall speed and performance? Let’s dive right in:

Compress Your Website’s Images

When uploading images to your website, avoid uploading the raw, ultra high-resolution file. This can cause bandwith issues on your web hosting server and increase the amount of time it takes for the image to become viewable by visitors to your website. There are also tons of image compression tools out there that reduce the file size of your images in exchange for a slight loss of quality. However, the decrease in image quality is hardly noticeable to the naked eye. TinyPNG is a solid option for image compression.

Make Sure Your Stylesheet Files are “Minified”

As any good web developer knows, stylesheet compression can also save a lot of load time for the browser. Instead of serving thousands and thousands of lines of code to the web server all at once, you’ll want to make sure that the developer of your website “minifies” the output of their CSS code. This essentially combines all those lines of code into one single line that allows the web browser to read the website’s styles much faster.

Enable Page Caching for Websites Using a CMS

Content management systems (CMS) are known to be a little on the heavier side when it comes to page loading. However, most CMS’s offer an option to enable page caching and script compression. This will allow a single version of each page on the website to be stored in a cache that gets served to your website’s visitors, thus reducing the amount of requests that are made to the web server.

Avoid Using Tons of Plug-ins or Scripts

It can be easy for web developers to fall into the “module trap”. That is, installing a ton of different modules or plug-ins just to achieve basic functionality. Each module or plug-in usually comes bundled with additional features that you might not even need. Not to mention that each of these features or scripts still run as a separate process behind-the-scenes. It’s important for developers to only use what they need and limit the amount of JavaScript or PHP requests when possible.

Not sure if your website is fast enough? Find out how CRRNT can help to optimize your website and keep visitors browsing your site!