10 Awesome Tips to Speed Up Your Website

April 30, 2016November 11, 2016 ECM TechNews 1 Comment #Internet, #tech

With a lot of tracking tools available, now you can easily check the loading time of your websites and see whether they perform well. Optimizing loading speed or minimizing loading time is very important because long loading time might make your visitors frustrating and not coming back to your websites.

Here are some tips to make your website load faster:

1: Use Clean-written code

A clean-written code is the basis for page loading speed optimization. You can use the W3C Markup Validation Service to check the markup of your web documents.

2: Use CSS instead of graphics

Images make your web pages slower. Some web designers decide to use image for styled text and other decorative elements (e.g. rounded corners ) on their web pages. Surely images will make your web page to display exactly how you intend them to show in every situation. But more images usually cause longer loading time.

If you have to use images, you need to resize and optimize the images and do not use images that are larger than they will be displayed in your web pages.

3: Reduce your codes

Reducing the web document size can significantly improve performance. If you are using a CMS, do not install unnecessary plugins. Always check to see if there is a better alternative to the plugin.

4: Outsource CSS and JavaScript files

External outsourced JavaScript files can also speed up your website. When a site is loaded, all files must be individually opened, read and processed. Outsourcing CSS and JavaScript files can parallel more local files to load.

5: Use optimization tools

Thanks to many Firefox extensions like YSlow and Firebug, web developers can use these powerful tools to test their codes. For example, With YSlow, it is possible to determine the time to load the files and to load the entire site.

6: Use asynchronous JavaScript

With asynchronous scripts, your page can render more quickly because the scripts can be loaded in the background instead of forcing users to wait for the scripts to finish loading before showing the web pages

7: Load JavaScript in the bottom of your codes

Try to put your JavaScript files or JavaScript codes at the bottom of the site. If JavaScript files come in the <head> of the site, your visitors do not see anything before the JavaScript files are loaded (unless you rely on asynchronous JavaScript). If the JavaScript code is set in the bottom of the site, the visitor can see the site contents while JavaScript is loading in the background. Although this strategy cannot be applied to all JavaScript codes, you can still keep the strategy in mind and use it when possible.

8: Use caching plugin for your CMS

No matter which CMS you are using, plugin does a lot of work for you, but it increases your loading time as well. Excessive loading time can limit your traffic, lower your Google search rank and affect your website’s overall potential. However, a free or low cost caching plugin can easily prevent this lag.

9: Remove unnecessary code spaces and breaks

To speed up a site further, you can also reduce the use of unnecessary comments, spaces and line breaks in your HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the web page is processed by the browser is called “minification” (also called minimisation or minimization).

10: Combine JavaScript files

For example, instead of allowing several JavaScript files to be called individually, you can merge the files into a single JavaScript file. It will make a single load heavier, but it reduces number of calls.

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