Any
search engine wants to provide users a great user experience, just like
Google, and a fast site improves overall site quality and increases user satisfaction.
Everybody deserves a fast web experience. Making a backup before starting is
necessary. Some of the following tips can be implemented to increase the speed
of website.
a) Server-
Choosing suitable
hosting for your venture is the first step in starting a
website. Hosting with a professional configuration can be of big help.
- Leverage browser caching-When you
set an expires header for a resource, such as all jpeg images, the browser
will store those resources in its cache. The next time the visitor comes back to
the page it will load faster.
- Enable keep-Alive- signal is often
sent at predefined intervals and plays an important role on the Internet.
After a signal is sent, if no reply is received, the link is assumed to be
down and future data will be routed via another path until the link is up
again. In fact, HTTP Keep-Alive allows TCP connections to stay alive and
it helps reducing the latency for subsequent requests.
- Enable
gzip compression- Gzip is the
most popular and effective compression method currently available and
generally reduces the response size. It's an easy way to reduce page
weight.
- Make landing page redirects cacheable-
Mobile pages redirect users to a different URL, so making a cacheable redirect can speed
up page load time for the next time visitors try to load site
- Use a CDN-is a collection of web
servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content
more efficiently to users. The server selected for
delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of
network proximity.
b) Content elements-
Since you don't have total access to your server, content elements are the most
important things that you can manipulate.
- Minimize redirects- Sometimes to
indicate the new location of a URL, track clicks, connect different parts
of a site together or reserve multiple domains, you need to redirect the
browser from one URL to another. Redirects trigger an extra HTTP request
and add latency.
- Remove query strings from static
resources-You can't cache a link with a "?" in its
URL even if a Cache-control: public header is present. The question mark
acts the same as Ctrl+F5. Use query strings for dynamic resources only.
- Specify a character set-Specify a
character set in HTTP headers to speed up browser rendering. This is done
by adding a simple piece of code into your header.
- Minify your codes- Removing HTML
comments, CDATA sections, white spaces and empty elements will decrease your page
size, reduce network latency and speed up load time.
- Avoid bad requests- broken links
result errors. These cause wasteful requests. Use online broken link
checker or use Wordpress link checker for free.
- Serve resources from a consistent URL-resources
that are shared across multiple pages, make sure that each reference to the
same resource uses an identical URL. If a resource is shared by multiple pages/sites that link to
each other, but are hosted on different domains or hostnames, it's better
to serve the file from a single hostname than to re-serve it from the
hostname of each parent document.
c) CSS, JS and Images
- Specify image dimensions-Your
browser begins to render a page before images are loaded. Specifying image
dimensions helps it to wrap around non-replaceable elements.
- Optimize images- images can
contain extra comments and use useless colors. Keeping image sizes to a
minimum is a big help for users on slow connections. Try to save in JPEG
format.
- Put CSS at the top and JS at the
bottom-Putting stylelsheets in the document head of the page prohibits
progressive rendering, so browsers will block rendering to avoid having to
redraw elements of the page. In most of cases, users will face a white
page until the page is loaded completely.
