Speed counts in today’s digital environment. Be it an e-commerce site, blog, or business site, fast loading is critical when it comes to retaining users and converting them into customers. Google claims that with every second that goes by from 1 to 3 seconds for page load time, the likelihood of the user bouncing increases by 32%. The real story? Every micro-second counts.
In this post, we will show you how to improve the speed and load time of the website without affecting functionality or design.
1. Compress and Optimize Images
Images are often the heaviest assets present on a webpage and poorly optimized images can severely slow down loading speed.
Best Practices:
Use modern formats: WebP and AVIF are a better choice against JPEG and PNG when it comes to compression.
Resize images: Only load the size that fits into the area displayed.
Compress files: Use anything from TinyPNG or ImageOptim to cut file size without perceivable loss of quality.
If you’re on WordPress, you might also look into plugins like ShortPixel or Smush for automatic compression.
2. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from your code files, such as spaces, comments, and line breaks, to make them smaller and therefore download faster.
Minification can be carried out through:
– Tools like CSSNano, UglifyJS, and HTMLMinifier.
– Automating through build tools like Webpack or Gulp.
WordPress also has tools such as Autoptimize that can take care of both minification and aggregation.
3. Enable Browser Caching
When the browser caching is enabled, the repeat visitors will not need to reload all elements of a page when visiting a page for the second time.
How to implement:
Change your .htaccess file or make use of plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
Expiration times to set for static resources like image, CSS, and JS.
4. Use a CDN
A CDN copies your website from one part of the world to another, so there is less distance for the data to travel and therefore less time required for it to load.
Popular CDNs:
Cloudflare
Amazon CloudFront
Stackpath
5. Decrease HTTP Requests
Every element on a page (images, scripts, stylesheets) needs an HTTP request. More requests = slower loading.
Strategies:
Combine your CSS and JS files.
Use CSS sprites for your icons.
Cut down on the amount of external scripts, like fonts or ad networks.
6. Lazy Load
Deferred loading, it refers to the fact that images and resources are only downloaded when really needed (e.g., by scrolling), and does that by simply calling them lazy loading.
How you do this:
Implement the loading=”lazy” attribute in <img> tags.
This feature is now included as standard in WordPress and many other CMSs.
7. Optimize Your Hosting
Sometimes, all that is on your part for the bottleneck in operations will be your hosting provider. When your site is gradually growing, it is advisable to upgrade.
Options:
Move from Shared to VPS or Cloud hosting.
Use Managed WordPress Hosting (example: Kinsta, WP Engine).
8. Activate GZIP Compression
GZIP shrinks the size of your CSS, HTML, and JS files before sending them to the browser.
How to enable it:
GZIP comes as standard on almost all web servers like Apache and Nginx.
Use online tools like Check Gzip Compression to verify too.
9. Cleanup Your Database
Post revisions, spam comments, and transient options are all junk from time to time in your website database.
Use tools:
WP-Optimize
Advanced Database Cleaner
10. Take Measurements and Monitor Performance
These performance monitoring will keep you in the know about any issues. Recommended tools:
Google PageSpeed Insights
GTmetrix
WebPageTest
Lighthouse (Chrome DevTools)