Optimising your website for speed

We all hate it when a website is slow to load and according to research by Kissmetrics, 40% of users will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So if you want to make sure your website doesn’t lose customers then you need to optimise it for speed. Here are the best ways to do just that:

Optimise images -

Large high-resolution images may look great but the reality is that for most websites you can get away with cutting the size of these down to help improve the speed of your website.

Minimise HTTP requests -

Images, stylesheets, and scripts are all elements that make up your page and are requested by the web browser from your server. The more requests you have the slower your page will be.

Combine files and minify them -

Instead of having multiple CSS, JavaScript and template files consider combining these to help reduce the number of requests you make. You can also minify these files to reduce their overall size.

Load scripts asynchronously -

A common problem is where scripts load synchronously which means that they load in order to the content of your pages can’t be loaded before the scripts have been downloaded. Asynchronous loading helps to solve this problem and load scripts together rather than in order.

Choose the right hosting - 

Many businesses often pick the cheapest hosting provider and don’t really give it much thought, this is fine when starting out but for optimum performance, you’ll want VPS or dedicated hosting as this will enable your website to run much faster.