10 Techniques of Website Speed Optimization: Performance Testing and Improvement Practice

If you are a website owner, you would want anyone who visits your site have a fast and seamless experience. However, we have seen so many instances where the time taken to open a page is so long. This can be quite frustrating for the consumer and you could lose potential clients.

If you are facing such issues, then don’t worry.Today, I am going to help you solve this problem and make your site lightning quick.

Before you get started with optimising, you need to find out what the current load times and speed performances your website has. This information will help you know what is causing your website to load slowly. Once you know what is causing to slowdown your website, you can make changes accordingly to speed things up.

According to experts, the time taken for any website to load up should be less than 3 seconds. However, according to a research from Google, it was discovered that only a few websites were able to achieve that cut-off time. Having a site that loads up faster also helps in boosting your ranking on google and other search engines.

Here are some tools which you can use to check your website load times:

• Google Page Speed Insights
• Pingdom
• YSlow

Top 10 Techniques of Website Speed Optimisation

Now that you have tested your website load times, it’s time to learn some techniques that can optimise your website.

1. Optimise Your Image Size This is a very simple trick that can help boost your loading times. If you are using pictures on your website, try to use JPEG files for you website rather than PNG files. JPEG files are more optimised for the web. JPEG files provide same level of quality and usability while taking up lesser space. There are a number of tools available online that let you convert your pictures to JPEG format.

2. Try To Use as Little Media as Possible

If your website contains too much media like photos and videos, the loading time for such websites increases significantly. Photos and videos require high-speed internet connections to load faster which might not be available for everyone. Apart from your homepage, try to keep media contents on other pages as low as possible.

3. Reduce Plugins

No proper website would be complete without plugins. These plugins help add features to your website, making them more intuitive. However, these plugins can slow down your load times for your websites. The more plugins you add, the slower your website will get.

4. Use A Better Host

Having your own dedicated server for hosting is the fastest way to load your websites. Shared hosting is cost-effective but it provides the slowest load times. So, the most economical and optimal solution would be to go for a virtual private server which will be both fast and economical for your website.

5. Using a Content Delivery Network

Having a web server in a single location can increase load times for people staying geographically farther from you. If you are having servers in different locations, you can help reduce load times for people around the world drastically.

6. Lesser Redirects

Having more HTTP requests affects the websites performances drastically. It is best to reduce them or remove them altogether.

7. Use Limited Fonts

It is advisable not to have more than 2 to 3 different fonts for your website. If you use custom fonts, these will require downloading and reduce your website load times. Also, avoid using italics and bold fonts.

8. Avoid Animations

Animations help your website look more beautiful and attractive. However, they require you to load them which reduce the load times of the websites. Avoid using animations on all pages and limit them to a handful of pages only.

9. Use Gzip Compression

This helps reduce the size of files on the website. This minimises HTTP requests on the site and reduces server response time. This can be used for all types of files and make loading faster.

10. Mobile Performance

Many people now use their cell phones to access websites. Optimising your website for cell phones can help deliver better user experience.

Website speed optimization is important for getting a good ranking in SEO. When you’ll test your website load time, the software will already provide you with some of these suggestions upon detecting the cause behind the delay. Following the above 10 techniques in the first place will help you achieve better results.

Also Read this:-
Proffesional WordPress Speed Optimization Service