Five Easy Ways To Improve Website Speed
Increasing your website speed comes with a whole host of benefits. For starters, you will get more visitors – search engines have long used loading speed as a ranking criteria for awhile now. Of the more people who are now clicking onto your site, fewer people will drop out – a one-second delay causes an 11% drop in traffic! It doesn’t stop there either. It’s been widely reported that better speeds yielded better eCommerce revenue as well.
Increasing your website speed, like many things, is an aggregation of small improvements. But before you get started, please make a backup of your current site – you never know if there are any hidden dependencies.
But with that said, let’s jump in!
Optimize your Images
Images take up sizable chunks of space when your website loads, so be sure that they are not needlessly big. Sites like Canva help you reduce the resolution and increase the compression of your image while still keeping that crisp enough for your visitors. For example, our blog article width is 732px, so all our images are resized to fit that dimension perfectly so that loading time is minimized.
Minify your code
Comments and spaces are mainstays of web development. It improves readability and provides documentation for future changes which is great, except that at runtime this is unnecessary data that has to be served. Minifying services like Will Peavy’s removes these extraneous comments and spaces, shaving off precious space from the final files that are served to and rendered.
Put your CSS tags at the top, and Javascript tags at the bottom
Generally speaking, your CSS declarations should come as early as possible as most browsers don’t render pages before the CSS is loaded, preventing the website from flashing as the stylesheets are loaded.
With Javascript, however, it is better to keep it as far down as possible, as browsers don’t parse any code that come after it until the scripts are loaded and completed, so you would want the visual elements to already be in place while the Javascript loads.
Use a CDN
A content delivery network is a system of distributed servers that deliver content to users in order to optimize for performance. What this means is that if you use a CDN, files will be served to your users from multiple server locations that are closer to them. This reduces the load on any single server as well, improving the experience of your users.
Eliminate the need to redirect traffic to a mobile version of the site with a responsive design
These days, creating great multi-device experiences is easier than ever with a design that is responsive, negating the need to redirect your users from the desktop version of your site to a mobile optimized one.
How fast does your website need to be?
Pingdom, a speed checker tool recently released statistics on all the sites their users have checked in 2015 and had some intriguing finds.
The average web page:
- has a load time of 5 seconds
- is 3MB large
- has an average of 42 images
- makes an average of 89 requests
- loads 21 JavaScript commands
What this means is that you should, at least, try to match those numbers and be safe in the knowledge that you are performing at least on par with websites that people are testing – ensuring you do not needlessly lose traffic.
Two tools to check the speed of your website
Google Page Insights: Google Page insights is an easy to use tool to run automated tests. The best part of the tool is that it also offers specific fixes like to compress your Javascript and CSS files.
Pingdom: If you want to take it up a notch, Pingdom is quite possibly the best in class when it comes to benchmarking. It not only gives you a constant grasp on your website’s uptime but also real-time monitoring of your user’s experience.
Be sure to also check out our previous article on tools and tactics you can employ to improve your website speed.