Waiting is always irritating and everyone hates to wait. This is also true for websites and blogs, if your website takes too much time to load. It starts losing its visitors and customers.
Therefore, website loading time have been considered as a crucial factor to give user’s better experience.
According to Amazon data, 1% sales reduce with the delay of 100 milliseconds website loads. You can look for the true data from here,
In all, it can put some negative effect on your website like –
- Decrease Page views
- Increase Bounce rate
- Conversion loss
Make sure that your website should not be suffer from above effects.
As a website owner, it should be your aim to not only make your website user friendly but also make it server friendly.
Before focusing on below parameters, you need to first check the loading speed of your website using some effective speed checker tool like Pingdom
If your website loads fast then it will also be loved by those who have slower internet connections, moreover, it also become search engine friendly.
Let’s first listen what Matt Cutts say about determining page speed.
If your website loads fast then it will also be loved by those who have slower internet connections, moreover, it also become search engine friendly.
Let’s first listen what Matt Cutts say about determining page speed.
3 – Optimize Images:
It is truly said that “A picture is worth a thousand words” so always use images to explain anything better.
But images can be obstacle for servers so we need to make them server friendly.
Is possible then use background coloring rather than large graphics.
Whenever you edit any image for website then while saving the image use “save as web” option.
When you optimize the images in web format, it reduces size of image and the pages load much faster.
If you use jpeg in your web pages, try to compress it with a jpeg compression tools such as JPEG Compressor.
Without any noticeable effect these tools will reduce size of your jpeg images by 70%.
While optimizing your images perform page loading speed test simultaneously. It helps you a lot to understand your site speed.
4- Choose correct format for images:
Besides optimizing your image you should also be able to choose perfect image format.
I believe you are already familiar with various image formats such as JPEG, TIFF, GIF, Bitmap, PNG etc.
When we talk about web pages then we need web friendly formats and JPEG, PNG and GIF are our best options.
If you need to upload a high quality image go for JPEG format. GIF format image is most suitable for logo, PNG can also be used as a richer format for logo.
5 – Optimize all large files:
Flash files (swf), videos, large scripts etc, they should be optimized.
The best way to optimize such files is use editor program which offers many options to lessen size of the file.
Observe and analysis your competitors site and see how they use small size pages.
Learn from those who are leading you and then only you can lead them in future. If your videos and flash files are of lesser size then they will also take less bandwidth.
6- Keep Design and Interface Simple:
Don’t ever try to give unnecessary look to your site go with simpler design.
Websites having simple layouts load much faster. Prefer text links over buttons.
You can give attractive look to text links. Don’t go for graphical buttons if you have to use many such links in your page.
7- Define height and width:
If you are mentioning height and width of images then you are directly reducing loading time of website.
Predefining height and width of an image informs the browser how much space it should reserve for the image.
So other portions of the website can load simultaneously with image and it reduces overall loading time.
Defining parameters for image not only improves page load time but also ensures that image will fit into the design and layout of website.
8. Use Clean CSS:
Most of the websites are designed with CSS (Cascaded style sheet) to give better design.
Ask your developers after coding a CSS completely eliminate lines which are unnecessary.
Clutter free CSS will help pages to load fast. Optimized CSS code will work like a wizard to reduce loading time.
To optimize CSS files, one of the most crucial steps you can do is to use every declaration just once.
It means strict use of selector grouping.
Many times when you code CSS file, you just keep on coding without knowing that you can optimize the same code without effecting the functionality of CSS file.
Let’s take a simple example:
Many times we code like this:
h1 { color: Blue; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold; }
p { color: black; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold;}
We can optimize this rule into a single line like this:
h1, p { color: black; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold; }
p { color: black; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold;}
We can optimize this rule into a single line like this:
h1, p { color: black; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold; }
9-Use a Backslash at the end of the link:
When you add a backslash at the end of the website link, it reduces the server’s website identification and location time.
It helps server to locate the target immediately.
For example, when you click on link premium wordpress theme the final backslash helps the server to understand what you are looking for because server ends reading after final backslash and locates your page faster.
10 – Analyze W3C standard and Load time regulary:
To keep your site good and active you must check it regularly.
Maintain an error free site and modify it frequently.
Never forget to check and examine W3C standard and load time for your site. If anything goes wrong then take action immediately.