Points to be remembered to improve your Website Performance
Why Your website speed matters?
The speed of your website matters for two reasons:
- Your user’s experience
- When it comes to user experience, Google’s research experiments show that faster site speed leads to happier users, increased productivity, and more time users spend browsing.
- SEO
- Regarding SEO, Google uses site speed as one of the many factors that determine rank (how high your page appears in search results).
What is good load time?
- It’s a good idea to set a goal for where you want it to be and then set an acceptable page speed.
- According to Google, the best practice is three seconds. But if you manage to get a load time under 10 seconds, you’re doing fine.
How to Check your website speed?
To tell whether your website is slow or not, use one of the many free tools out there designed to report just that. Here are several:
How to make your website load faster?
1. Cache as much as possible content/data
Caching is a technique to speed up data lookups (data reading). Instead of reading the data directly from its source, which could be a database or another remote system, the data is read directly from a cache on the computer that needs the data. Use server side and client side caching methods. Here, Memcached server-side caching method is briefly explained
Memcached Server Caching
- Memcached is an open source, distributed memory object caching system that alleviates database load to speed up dynamic Web applications by reducing database load.
- In other words, every time a database request is made it adds additional load to the server. Memcached reduces that load by storing data objects in dynamic memory.
- Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.
2. Improve your hosting plan
- One of the simplest ways you can speed up your website: looking at your server.
- Most new site owners choose the cheapest possible option for hosting. While this is often enough in the beginning, you’ll likely need to upgrade once you start getting more traffic.
- When looking at hosting, you have three different options:
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated server
3. Understand HTTP requests
- Sites are mainly slow because of too many (or too large) HTTP requests. When you understand HTTP requests, you can better eliminate them.
- HTTP is a request/response protocol used by a web browser to fetch files from the web server.
- There are many ways you can reduce or eliminate HTTP requests:
- Minimize the number of extra domains that issue redirects but don't actually serve content
- Never require more than one redirect to get to a given resource.
- Never reference URLs in your pages that are known to redirect to other URLs
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- A CDN is essentially many optimized servers around the world that deliver web content to users based on their geographic location.
- Here’s what you can store on a CDN:
- JS files
- CSS files
- Images
- Other uploaded files (like videos, PDFs)
- Some common CDNs include:
5. Image Optimization
- Site size generally, and image sizes specifically, make a huge difference to your site speed. The larger your content/images, the slower the site.
- Optimize images before uploading them to your site by:
- Changing the resolution
- Compressing the picture
- Proper Format Selection
- Store different size of the same image to use at a different location for better quality of the image.
6. Optimize Files and Delivery
- There are many ways you can do for optimization of JS and CSS files:
- Minification and compression
- Combine files
- Code Positioning
- Putting stylesheets in the document head of the page prohibits progressive rendering, so browsers will block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page. And, put your javascript code at the bottom of the page for the same reason.
- Specify a character set in HTTP headers to speed up browser rendering. This is done by adding a simple piece of code into your header:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
- Load Javascript and CSS files asynchronously: Websites today are increasingly integrated with third-party content. So if you load async in the event then your page won’t be held up trying to load that resource. Async loading can also speed up page loads.
7. Mobile friendly Quality and Test
- Take a mobile-friendly test to assess your website:
- Mobile-Friendly Test - Google Search Console is the easiest way to check your website’s usability on mobile.
- Optimize your UI(user interface) and UX(user experience) to mobile devices.
You’ve just read my seven tips for improving your website. Now it’s time to put these tips into action.
Posted by: Khyati J. Shah
Software Developer
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