6 Ways to Speed up Your Website Page Loading Time

Every website owner endeavors to give visitors the best and hassle-free experience possible. Yet website owners are concerned about traffic. One of the factors that increase your bounce rate is page loading time or the time it takes for a single page to load. Google says 53% users will turn away if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load — which means they will not even enter your website let alone explore.

Worried? Well, it’s not an insurmountable problem. Here are some ways to speed up website load speed.

1. Bundling

Your website page has many components and each component is a separate file that must be requested before it loads. The more the number of requests the slower your site will load because your viewer’s browser has to keep “talking” to the server and wait for the request to be fulfilled. Combining files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will reduce the number of requests and consequently, the time your page takes to load.

2. Asynchronies Defer and Compress

Your web page loads from top to bottom by default, loading one component at a time. If even one component takes longer than others it can seriously affect load speed. But you can configure your website to load more than one component at a time — load asynchronously — or defer loading of certain components — such as JavaScript — until required. When you defer an element of your page, you also defer allied components — for instance, you may delay the CSS associated with your JS choosing to load both at the same time.

Each component of your website is a separate file. The larger your files are, the longer they will take to load. Compressing the larger components — such as media files — will help load pages faster.

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3. DNS and Hosting

Everyone wants to reduce cost — and one way to do that is to use shared hosting. The downside of this is that your website load speed may be negatively impacted by traffic to other sites on the same host because you share all resources including RAM and CPU. VPS plans allow you to have pockets of dedicated resources at a marginally higher cost, which can speed up page loading time. A dedicated server is, of course, the best option but it can be costly.

Hosting plan notwithstanding, every request to visit your website generates a lookup in the DNS (Domain Name Server) database for the IP address. Reducing the time taken for this search can speed up website load time significantly and switching to a faster provider may help.

4. CDN and External Hosting

It is also advisable to ask your provider about CDN or Content Delivery Network which can help speed up delivery to your client’s browser. When a user makes a request it is sent to the nearest CDN server rather than directly to the hosting server. The CDN server saves the most significant — or prioritized content and delivers it quickly while waiting for the rest of the website.

If you must use a lot of videos and presentations, it is a good idea to upload them to an external host like YouTube or Slide Share and embed them into your website. This brings you many benefits. First, you won’t run out of hosting storage space — at least not anytime soon. Secondly, you will utilize fewer local resources which means, your video is less likely to lag when streaming. Embedding externally hosted media is a great way to reduce load time.

CDN coupled with external hosting can significantly ramp up the page loading rapidity.

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5. Media Size and Volume

Images and other media files can seriously slow down page load. On the other hand, websites — or even pages that avoid media totally can reduce website traffic. Whether you have an e-commerce website or you are offering services — or even running a blog — media improves user experience. Studies have shown that reducing file size can speed up page loading time by 70%.

When uploading images to your website, make sure they are cut to size. Setting the width or height won’t work because the browser still needs to load the original and then make adjustments. You must ensure that you upload smaller images.

Also, though media is necessary, keep it in moderation and spread it across pages on your website. Going overboard might just leave your visitors waiting and eventually turn them away — defeating the original purpose.

6. Prioritize

As we already said, your website page loads from top to bottom component by component. The viewer will, therefore, view the top of the page first. Keeping the top of your page light — by reducing the number and size of media files, using compression, and other techniques — will allow the top half to load quickly. Then while the visitor is absorbing this content, let the rest of the page load and be ready for when he decides to scroll down.

The ultimate goal of any business is to drive traffic to their website and any search engine optimization services in India can tell you that load time is a critical metric to watch out for. These tricks will help you speed up your sales by giving your visitors an awesome experience.

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