Speed is a huge factor in website design. Nobody likes to wait around for a slow website to load, and that's why it's important to prioritize website speed during your design process. However, you don't want to sacrifice quality for speed.
In this blog post, we will give you tips and tricks on how to improve your website's loading time and how to test your site speed without sacrificing any features or design elements.
Tips and Tricks for a Faster Website Speed
There is a lot of conflicting information out there when it comes to website speed and how to best go about optimizing it. It can be tough to know where to start and even more challenging to know which changes will have the most significant impact on load time. We've put together this guide - to help you prioritize your website speed during your next design project. Remember that not all of these tips will be applicable in every situation. Hopefully, this will give you a good starting point for speeding up your website.
1. Examine Your Current Hosting Provider
Your hosting provider could be one of the biggest reasons your website is slow. If you're on a shared host, your site is sharing resources with other sites hosted on the same server. This can lead to slower speeds, especially during peak traffic times.
You might want to consider upgrading to a VPS or dedicated server. This will give you more control over your website's resources.
If you're not happy with your current host's page loading times, it may be time to switch to a new provider. When examining potential new hosts, be sure to pay attention to their page loading speeds and any other features that could affect site performance.
2. Optimize Images
Optimizing images is one of the easiest ways to improve website speed. You can do this in several ways, such as using file formats optimized for loading quickly and compressing pictures onto your site, so they don't take up too much bandwidth when you load from remote sources like Google ranks.
Find out what type or size ratio works best with how many pixels appear per inch (PPI). It will vary depending upon whether height or width of your target for the visual. Generally, you want to avoid using too many large images on your website or images that are not optimized for the web. These will slow down your website and frustrate your visitors
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The CDN is an effective way to distribute content worldwide so that users can enjoy their experience no matter where they are located. It also helps improve website speed by loading pages more quickly than if these were hosted locally; this may be helpful for those who own sites with lots of international visitors or traffic coming from far away.
4. Minimize HTTP Requests
One of the primary factors that affect website speed is the number of HTTP requests. An HTTP request is generated each time a browser fetches a file from a server. This includes image files, CSS files, JavaScript files, and so on.
The more files your pages need to load, the longer it will take for them to render. Therefore, it's important to minimize the number of HTTP requests your pages generate.
There are a few ways to do this:
- Use CSS instead of images whenever possible. Images can be replaced with CSS effects such as gradients, shadows, and so on.
- Consider image sprites. An image sprite is a single image file that contains multiple individual images. By using an image sprite, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to load a page.
- Apply data URIs. Data URIs allow you to embed small files, such as images, directly into your CSS files. This reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to load a page.
- Involve inline images. Inline images are images that are embedded directly into your HTML code. This reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to load a page.
5. Enable Compression on Your Web Server
Compression reduces the size of the files that your web server sends to visitors. Compression can reduce bandwidth usage and improve page load times. You can enable compression on your web server using these options. For Apache servers, use mod_deflate or mod_gzip. For IIS servers, use the URLScan tool. And for NGINX servers, you can use gzip compression.
6. Determine Your DNS Performance
The first thing you need to do when trying to optimize your website speed is to determine your Domain Name System (DNS) lookup time. Your DNS is what translates domain names (like www.example.com) into IP addresses that computers can understand. When someone types in your domain name, their computer needs to look up the associated IP address to find your website.
7. Improve Server Response Times
Reducing server response times, also known as Time To First Byte (TTFB), is one of the most impactful ways you can optimize your website's speed. Your server's response time is the amount of time it takes to load the first byte of data after a user submits a request to your server.
8. Audit Your Site's Current Speed
Before making any modifications that will influence how your site loads and handles content, it's a good idea to review current performance. The main takeaway from this is that the page speed of your website should affect how you approach it in terms of digital marketing.
It's not only about finding out what kind of results are attractive for SEO, but also about gaining first-hand knowledge on what works and what does not work for conversion rates.
We are Ready to Handle Your Website Needs!
Your business has grown, and you need an in-house team to maintain it. WE ARE READY TO HELP! Inbound Design Partners specializes not only in website development but also in addressing performance issues on your site that may be affecting your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
We understand how important this step is when people start their online journey with your company or organization through Google searches explicitly designed around what they're interested in at any given time.
Get in touch with us today to improve your website.
