Sep 28th, 2022

How to Increase Website Loading Speed

If you are looking for advice on how to increase website loading speed, you probably already know that page loading speeds have an effect on how well a site does in search engine rankings. For this reason alone, it’s well worth investing some time and energy in optimising your website’s page loading performance.

Customer experience is another excellent reason to worry about your website loading speed. Websites with slow-loading pages tend to experience higher bounce rates: a greater number of visitors leave the site before they have finished waiting for the first page to load.

Whatever your reason for wanting to increase the loading speed of your website, you are sure to find the following suggestions useful. Each one can help you to improve the performance of your website and, when taken as a whole, they should have a clearly measurable effect.

Website Speed Optimisation Tips

Some of these tips may be more practical for larger websites but most can be successfully applied to websites of all shapes and sizes.

  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – For very busy websites with a global reach, a high-quality CDN can offer a quick fix as far as page loading speeds are concerned. The main attraction of this option is that it does not require you to perform any onsite optimisation: simply by having pages cached in remote locations, your website’s performance will increase around the world. However, the pages on your site may still be relatively inefficient so choosing this option could lead you to leave something on the table in terms of ultimate loading speeds. For smaller, more locally-focused websites, a CDN may be considered as overkill.
  • Minify Your CSS and JS Files – Minification is the name given to the process of minimising the size of CSS and JS files by removing all unnecessary syntax from the code they contain. The way to approach this task is to remove any and all syntax that does not change the way your code functions. This may include comments, indents (especially repeated indents) and spaces. If you do not have the time to minify your code files manually, there are several tools available that will take care of most of the hard work for you.
  • Optimise Your Images – If you have spent much time looking for Google page website loading speed insights, you have probably already come across a number of recommendations to optimise the images that you use on your website. However, given the relatively large size of image files when compared to most other files that are commonly used on websites, we think this advice is worth repeating. You can find many easy-to-use image compressors online: free apps that will compress your image files in a number of ways.
  • Reduce the Load on Your Server by Minimising HTTP Requests – The more requests an individual server has to deal with, the more chance there is that your website may become unresponsive when traffic is particularly heavy. You can help to reduce the chances of this becoming a serious issue by minimising the number of HTTP requests any individual server receives. There are a number of options to explore when trying to achieve this aim, such as distributing page components across multiple servers, embedding inline images in tables inside CSS files and combining graphic elements that are in SVG format into one file. All these techniques can help to reduce server load in times of heavy traffic.
  • Place Your CSS Elements at the Top of Each Page – Website loading speed optimisation is not all about reducing the total loading speed of each page on your site. It is also concerned with giving visitors a more pleasant and consistent experience as pages are loaded. By positioning all CSS elements at the top of a page, you will ensure a more even and visually pleasing loading experience. When placed further down a page, these elements may prevent certain types of content from loading until the end, leaving visitors staring at a blank white page and wondering what has gone wrong.
  • Put Your JS Elements at the End of Each Page – If you place JS files at the beginning of a page, they may block the loading of certain other components. By placing them at the end of each page, you can ensure this is not an issue. Furthermore, because most dynamic page elements are not accessed until a page is fully loaded, it should not negatively impact the user experience on your website to any significant degree.
  • Always Use Browser Cache – When learning how to increase website loading speed, most web developers will cover the topic of how to effectively use the browser cache. By employing optimal settings for HTTP caching headers, you can minimise the amount of unnecessary duplicate file transfer requests that are received by your servers. This action alone can make a significant difference if you are not currently taking advantage of the browser cache in any way or form.
  • Use Multiple Hostnames to Encourage Parallel Downloads – Browsers normally default to allowing two threads for each server with which they are communicating. By spreading your website resources across more than one hostname, you may be able to circumvent this threshold and access more threads for parallel downloading of webpage components. Considering the large number of components that are present on the average webpage today, it is not surprising that this strategy can often prove to be very effective. For visitors to your site that are using fast broadband connections, parallel downloads could lead to an improvement of as much as 40% in terms of webpage latency.

Contact Us Today To Help Speed Up YOUR Website

If you would like more information on how to maximise your website loading speed, please do not hesitate to contact the team at Smart Traffic. We provide a complete SEO service which includes professional technical optimisation for all types of web pages on all types of websites. Call 02 8205 3133 during normal working hours or use the contact form to send us a message at any time.

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