Speed Up Your Website

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Speeding up a webpage or a website is as important as finding the right hosting provider or domain name. Why?

Just read the following statistics and you will change your mind.

One second in page load time yields −

  • 11% fewer page views.
  • 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
  • 7% loss in conversions.

Amazon found this to be true, reporting increased revenue of 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed based on their group reports.

Based on the results of a study done by Akamai −

  • 47% of people expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less.

  • 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

  • 52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a website.

How to Test my Website Speed?

Some noted experts of this field suggest to use an online tool which is called as Webpagetest (https://www.webpagetest.org/). It is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google. It does the website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.

In our example, we will be testing the performance of howcodex.com for a user from Germany using the Chrome browser.

To run the test, open the URL https://www.webpagetest.org/

Type in the domain name as shown in the following screenshot −

  • Test location – It is the country of the user location.
  • Browser – It is to simulate users’ browser.
  • Click “Start Test”.
Test Performance

We will get the following results in the main page. It will show all the time needed to open the webpage with its respective elements.

Main Page

If we go to the Performance Review section, it will indicate which elements should be optimized.

Performance Review

How to Speed up my Website?

The basic tips to speed up your website are as follows −

  • Minimize HTTP requests − In simple words; simplify your webpage design.

  • Minimize server response time − As per the users’ location, the server response time changes, this is because of the distance between them. It is recommended that if most of your visitors are in one specific region, your hosting provider should be located there too, this makes the traveling distance shorter for the data.

  • Enable Compression − Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing the HTTP response. You can do this with a tool called Gzip.

  • Enable Browser Cache − When you visit a website, the elements of the page are stored on cache storage, so next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.

  • Optimize Images of your website.

  • CSS delivery should be external if possible. The external style sheet is preferable, because it reduces the size of your code and creates fewer code duplications.

  • Reduce redirections which create HTTP requests.

  • If your website is a Content Management System platform, then minimize the usage of plugins as much as possible.

  • Remove broken links from your JavaScript, CSS and Image URLs.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to advertise a webpage.

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