15 Factors to Load Your Website in less than 0.5 Seconds!

Google has officially revealed that site speed is one of the aspects it utilizes when it ranks sites. With this said, not only could your sluggish site be costing you quality traffic from the search engines, it's also probably costing your conversions. Here are a couple of suggestions to make your site run faster.

1. Modification of Your Web Host:

If you're using a crappy web host, If you're using a web host that is not properly configured to deal with your website, and also if you've outgrown the capability of your web host - your website will be slow.

If your web host is not appropriately configured to empower your website, all the other suggestions in this post won't have much of an effect. So the initial step is to get in touch with your web hosting service provider to see if there's something they can do to make your site run quicker and if you're not satisfied with the results you get, change your host.

Depending on how huge your website is, you might require a much better/bigger server. For instance, you may need to update from shared hosting to a VPS or devoted server.

2. Limitation of Different Products on a Single Page:

It can be images, videos, links, texts or other kinds of content on your site. The more contents a visitor to your site can access simultaneously, the more it is likely for your website to be slow for them.

This is particularly essential if you utilize multimedia on your website, like images, as each image adds to the time it takes for your site to load therefore making your site slower. You can make your website quicker by having little content on each page of your website and providing people an alternative to click through to a next page to see the next page of the content.

The impact this can have on website speed and user experience was efficiently shown in a 2009 Google study. Google explored displaying 30 results on a page rather than 10 and this resulted in a boost of 0.5 seconds in page load speed. It was kept in mind that the pages that display 30 results, experienced a 20% drop in traffic compared with the pages with simply 10 outcomes. We're discussing a website load speed of less than 1 second here. In other words, even the small changes could have a massive effect.

This also applies to those who have a blog site; you can get more results by limiting the variety of articles shown on your blog homepage. Instead of having 10 - 20+ short articles noted on one page, limit it to 3 - 5 and let people be able to click to gain access to more contents. This makes your site quicker, drives more views and develops much better user experience.

3. Don't Host Your Files on Other Servers:

This procedure is called "hotlinking" and it can be damaging to your website. According to Wikipedia, hotlinking is "the practice of displaying an image on a site by embedding to the same image on another website, rather than conserving a copy of it on the website on which the image will be shown." In other words, instead of downloading a variation of an image you saw on Flickr and hosting it on your site, you decide to configure your website to pull the image straight from Flickr instead of your site whenever anyone checks out the part of your site that has the image packed. As a result, you're saving bandwidth by depending on another individual's resources.

The danger in this is that your website is depending on a third-party that hosts the image to run and if anything occurs to that website or the server, it'll impact the part of your website where the image is embedded.

4. Optimize Images Utilized on Your Website:

Images, if used effectively, can be really effective for your website. In fact, a current research study has revealed that the larger the image utilized with a piece of content, the more likely it is to draw individuals in to check out the content.

However, the larger the image utilized to support your content, the larger its size and the more likely it is to produce a sluggish website experience for your users.

So how do you make your site quick while still using images? Optimize your images.

Many images are very big in size however the reality is that it's not constantly the quality of an image that is taking up space. A lot of factors count in this regard, like useless colors, extra comments and unneeded data stored in your image file. All these can be eliminated to significantly reduce the size of your image without lowering its quality and as a result, make your site much faster. You can optimize your images by simply using some image optimizer tools available on the internet for free.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network:

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of servers distributed in numerous places with the aim of developing a better experience for people trying to access content hosted on these servers. In many cases, a CDN will have servers hosted in various countries and with your site hosted on the CDN, whenever someone aims to visit your website, the CDN will immediately serve a variation of your site hosted on their server in the place closest to them.

This can be very effective if you get a lot of global traffic. Since visitors can now access the version of your site closest to them, the amount of time it takes your website to load decreases considerably.

A fantastic CDN network you can start with is MaxCDN.

6. Clean up your code:

The tidy code doesn't simply make your developer pleased, but it makes the pages of your site load quicker, too. Minimizing the size of website files, specifically front-end ones, can have a big impact. Even small concerns like line breaks and unnecessary tags can harm your page load time.

So, clean clean and clean unnecessary JavaScripts as soon as possible.

7. Minify HTML & CSS:

Minifying HTML and CSS will help you to package and deliver page information in the most structured way possible.

Open up Google's PageSpeed Insights, drop in your URL and after that send the instructions to a trusted developer.

8. Make use of GZIP compression:

GZIP compression deals with content encoding to again reduce server requests made by your browser. Very confusing, right?

In non-technical terms, GZIP compression lowers your file sizes to enable faster load times. So, do take advantage of it.

9. Reduce redirects:

301 redirects are a standard SEO-friendly practice utilized to inform both search engines and visitors that a page has completely transferred to a new location. It's a typical best practice when websites are re-structured and can assist you to cut down on broken links or 404 mistakes.

Problem is, too many redirects can also adversely affect speed. So the concern is the number of redirects. Here, Google's response is unclear - they simply recommend reducing or attempting to remove them all together, due to the fact that they cause extra network trips to verify data (which can be a killer on mobile phones especially).

So, utilize different website redirect checker tool available for free on the internet to rapidly recognize all of the redirects present on your website and then reduce the number of redirects as much as possible.

10. Relocate scripts:

Think it or not, even script placement can impact load times. For instance, if your tracking scripts are located in the header section of your landing page, your web browser will have to download and deal with those scripts prior to getting to the stuff an individual wants to see (like the page content).

So, having duplicate scripts (which is pretty typical when multiple people are working on the exact same page) will slow things down a bit.

And do you truly need 5 analytics packages on that landing page? Probably not. Like many things you've read so far, focus on simplification and minimization to lower the back-and-forth in between internet browsers and servers.

11. Limit WordPress plugins:

Taking a bunch of third-party tools built by different people is a recipe for disaster. Open WordPress right now and take a look at how many plugins your team has actually installed for basic things like social sharing or tracking. These things can and need to be done by an expert developer so you can completely avoid these plugins in the first place.

If you'd like to identify which plugins are worth keeping and which need to be deactivated right away, then install P3 (another plugin, LOL) which will measure your site's plugin performance and measure their effect on load times.

12. Resize images:

Asking internet browsers to instantly squeeze your initial 1200 px image down to 600px each time your landing page is visited, produces a ton of unnecessary additional work. (Especially on mobile devices with minimal processing power and relatively poor connectivity).

So, you should resize images prior to uploading them to the server. If that's too much work, you can still use at least the WordPress' built-in tool to resize images for you.

13. Compress images:

After resizing your images, the next action is compressing them to once again decrease file size.

There are a number of quick and complimentary tools out there, like TinyPNG or Compressor.io, which can considerably minimize file size.

14. Provide Images with a CDN:

Got the pattern?

Providing images with a Content Delivery Network (or CDN) resembles employing reinforcements from servers situated near to the website visitor. That means it will aim to use the closest ones initially to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver content from the server to a user's browser.

Popular ones like CloudFlare and MaxCDN can dramatically improve performance on highly visual websites.

15. External Hosting:

Another alternative is to move big files, like images, audios or videos of your servers completely and utilize an external hosting platform like Imgur for images or Wistia for videos.

As we've already explained the effect of image size to page speed, larger files like audio and video should generally be hosted externally.

That's important because abundant media adoption is immense. It was predicted in 2017 that 74% of internet traffic will be video. Beyond the performance concerns, external hosting suppliers also provide various benefits like increased audience reach or features that increase interactions and conversions.

Conclusion:

74% of individuals would leave a website if it doesn't load within 5 seconds. Which indicates that even if you're leveraging all the very best practices in the world to obtain those conversions, people won't stay long enough to really see any of it.

Page speed enhancements can vary from the basic (updating your hosting and getting rid of unnecessary plugins) to the more advanced (minifying files). But anything is certainly much better than nothing. Even paying additional focus on how you're submitting images can go a long way to improving efficiency.

Yes, implementing all these modifications will be a time-consuming procedure. No doubt. But it's likewise the very best method to provide your landing pages a fighting opportunity to transform visitors.

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Author: Rakib Hasan

Creative Credit: Abdul Wajed