Site speed and performance is an essential factor to the user experience. If your site loads too slow, you’re not only losing visitors, also potential customers. Search engines like Google and Yahoo use site speed as a ranking factor. So when optimizing your site speed, you must have considered everything. Every second counts and worth.
Following ate some of the basic suggestions on how to improve your site’s speed and performance.
1. Decrease Loading Content Where Possible
Ajax allows its users to build web pages that can easily be updated at any time. What this means is that instead of reloading the complete page, we can only update that part (the problem session) of the page.
Ajax allows us to build web pages that can be updated asynchronously easily at any time. This means that instead of reloading the complete page when a visitor acts, we can only update that part of the page.
An image gallery is a nice example of it. Image files are big, they can slow down the page loading speed.
When a user visits the web page.instead of loading all images at the same time — we can just display the thumbnails at the first. When a user first clicks the image, then the full-sized image will be displayed on the page.
Instead of loading all images on the page, when a user first visits the website, we can just display the thumbnails of the images and when a user clicks the image the full-size images display and update the page. This way if a user only wants to see a few images on the site, they don’t have to wait for all the images to download. This process is known as lazy loading.
Web development libraries like Prototype and jQuery are great resources to reduce the load time of a website.
2. Use External CSS and JavaScript Files
When the user first visits your website, the browser will cache the external resources like JavaScript and CSS files. Thus, instead of using inline CSS and JavaScript files, it’s better to use external files.
Using inline files will increase the rendering time of the webpage, explaining everything in your CSS file will let the browser work less when rendering a web page since it already knows all the rules that apply.
PRO TIP: Using external CSS and JavaScript files makes the site maintenance process easier as this way you only need to maintain the global files, not all code scattered in different web pages of the site.
3. Use Cache Systems
If your site is used to create the same content, then it’s time to start using a cache system. By using a caching system, your site only has to create the same content for once, not whenever a user visits your website. Don’t worry, cache systems are designed to refresh their caches accordingly — so even constantly changing web pages like blog posts can be cached as well.
Popular CMS’s (Content Management Systems) like WordPress comes with static caching features like converting dynamically generated pages to static HTML files to reduce the unnecessary processing of the server. In the case of WordPress, try using the WP Super Cache plugin.
4. Don’t Resize Images in HTML
If the original size of an image is 1280x900px in dimension, but you want it to be 640x250px. You should resize the image by using such photo editing tools like Photoshop instead of using HTML width and height attributes (i.e. <img width=”640″ height=”250″ src=”myimage.jpg” />). It’s simple because a large image will always be larger as compared to smaller images.
Instead of resizing images in HTML, resize and resave it using tools like Photoshop and then use it.
5. Don’t Use Images to Display Text
This feature is not only become inaccessible to screen-readers, but also useless for SEO, but using images to display text will increase the load time of the web page because more images mean a heavier page, and a heavier web page means it’ll take more time to load.
6. Optimize Image Sizes by Using the Right File Format
By choosing the correct image format, you can optimize file sizes without losing the image quality. For example, unless you need the image transparency that’s the PNG format has to offer, whereas the JPG or JPEG format displays the photographic images of all file sizes.
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