How to Optimize Your Website for Speed
Having invested in website development, content, and search engine optimization, you’ve come to the realization that something’s missing. The site looks attractive, it contains beautiful images and engaging articles, and users arrive as expected. However, they quickly abandon your site. Could it be because the website takes too long to load? In today’s fast-paced world, no one has time to wait for pages to load. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the eventual payoff is if no one sticks around to see it. To avoid losing valuable traffic, optimizing a website for speed is a must.
What makes a website slow? One of the biggest drags on a website involves the downloading of a page’s components such as images, Flash animations, scripts, and style sheets. The more HTTP requests a page makes, the longer it takes to render the web page. While you could eliminate components, thus eliminating the number of HTTP requests, you could speed up the website by taking advantage of a few optimization techniques.
When you combine files, you reduce the number of HTTP requests. For example, you could combine all of your scripts into one or create an image map which combines all of a page’s background images into a single image. Another option is to use in-line images to embed the image data into the page and then combine them into a cached style sheet. One of the best ways to combine background images into a single image is through the use of a CSS sprite. Setting the CSS background-image and background-position properties is an effective way to reduce HTTP requests.
Choosing Geographically Diverse Server Locations
The closer a user is to your server, the faster the page will load. However, your users are likely scattered across a vast geographical region making it impractical to locate servers wherever you think your users may be. Using a content delivery network, or CDN, solves this problem. CDNs involve multiple servers located across geographically diverse data centers. Depending on where a user is located, the server that can deliver the content with the fewest “hops” will be selected. This results in faster page loads for the user.
Optimizing the code that powers your page can also speed up your website.
Removing duplicate scripts – It’s not unusual for a single page to include duplicate JavaScript files. This can happen when you have a page with multiple scripts or when a large team is involved in the project. While a duplicate file isn’t necessarily harmful, it generates unnecessary HTTP requests which can slow website performance.
Minifying code – Computer code such as CSS and JavaScript often contain information that is not necessary for execution. For example, comments and white space such as tabs and blank lines are not needed to execute the script. However, they make the file larger which increases load times. By removing these unnecessary characters from the script’s file, you can reduce the file size and the load time. Special code minifying utilities such as YUI Compressor can quickly minify both JavaScript and CSS. You can also minify inline script blocks.
Locating Style Sheets – Where you place your style sheets can have a profound effect on the perceived load times. By placing style sheets in the HEAD section, the page loads progressively. The user will see the page’s header and top sections first and may be able to begin enjoying the page while the off-screen sections continue to load in the background.
Scale Images Before Uploading – Today’s high resolution photos come with huge file sizes. Even if you scale an image in HTML, its file size could be excessive and adversely affect load times. Instead of using a large image and scaling it down with HTML, use an image editor to create the correct image size for your website before uploading it. This will reduce the file size dramatically and improve website performance.
From combining files and choosing a content delivery network to making smarter coding decisions, these techniques can quickly optimize your website for speed.
Read more: How to Increase the Speed of Your Website Safely