One of the most critical tasks of an Internet site administrator is to make visitor navigation as comfortable as possible. The loading time of the home page is already decisive: long loads take up a lot of visitors. This is a topic that has become even more important with the increase in mobile traffic.
If you keep the performance of your website in mind and improve it regularly, you'll quickly see that your visitors spend more time on your site and leave it less quickly. On the contrary, they will open more pages. Another positive effect of such an acceleration of loading times is the improvement of your web referencing by search engines.
You can test the speed of your current website, for free with Google PageSpeed Insights or kingdom. These tools measure and evaluate the performance of a site independently of the network, but taking into account aspects such as media content or the structure of HTML codes. The Google tool analyzes both versions of your site for desktop computers and mobile variants. It then shows you suggestions for improvement.
Which aspects influence the loading speed? We inform you of the typical factors of the slowdown of Web page loads, and we show you solutions approaches.
Accommodation
In the first place, you should ask yourself if your current web hosting solution meets the requirements of your web project. Many users want to save money on the performance and capacity of their server and opt for cheap offers. If you receive a large number of user requests, you will not have enough bandwidth, and this will have adverse effects at a critical time for your business.
These cheap hosting solutions, where different actors share the resources of a server, show their limits regarding capacity during peaks visits or strong growth of activity of hosted sites. Another typical error is to host your website on a server abroad, even if the offers are sometimes limited in a national market. If your site is held from a server overseas, it increases the loading time for your visitors.
Here's what you can do:
· use flexible hosting solutions with unlimited capabilities
· rent a server located where most of your visitors are
· use a content delivery network if you are addressing an international target
· take charge of hosting yourself and harmonize it perfectly with your project
HTML, CSS and JavaScript
When visitors load your website, their web browser requests the HTML file from your server and then represents the corresponding CSS spreadsheets. This also applies to JavaScript elements such as banner ads or news. The larger the files, the longer the code line swap and the longer the loading process. However such design blocks and scripts are essential, especially for dynamic websites. Renouncing these CSS and JavaScript elements to increase the speed of your site is therefore impossible. Your attention should be focused on code optimization.
For this you can:
· Use HTML only for data with which CSS does not work
· Use separate files for CSS and JavaScript. Just write CSS and JavaScript code in the HTML page as an exception (JavaScript always at the end of the document and before the conclusion body element)
· Summarize the code files and compress them
Images and external content
Multimedia content is an integral part of a good website.
Along with the design and layout, the photos serve to illustrate your comments in your content. It is strongly recommended, especially in e-commerce, to present your products with quality photos. However, each image or Photo added increases the loading time of your website, especially when they are not saved on your server, but on a foreign server. This also applies to other media files such as music, videos or PDFs.
That's what you can do:
· limit as much as possible to load external page elements
· avoid redundant images and videos
· Compress pictures with tools
· store images on an external server
· Indicate the width and height of the images (otherwise, the browser sets them by default)
· use SVG icons (scalable vector graphics)
· use the jQery Lazy Load plugin to delay the loading of images when they are exposed on the screen (appearance after scrolling)
Cache memory
A problem of many slow sites is the renunciation of cache mechanisms. A well-organized buffer helps to optimize a website and requires little investment. The contents stored in such an intermediate memory must not be loaded from the server to each user request, which increases the speed of a site. This significantly reduces the load on the Web server, which must, therefore, handle far fewer applications. So you can set caches for all static items such as JavaScript and CSS, or images or documents and choose how long they will stay in the buffer.
Here are the different options:
· use the browser of the visitors as cache (cache of navigator): It is for example with an Apache web server module "mod_expires," to define how long the corresponding files must remain in the cache. The user's browser does the rest.
· Configure a reverse proxy server as a cache or attach to a content delivery network (CDN) to access an entire system worldwide.
· use caching software like memcached to temporarily drop dynamic contents into the RAM and minimize access to the database.
Other tips and tricks for optimizing your website
Apart from these significant steps to improve the performance of your project online, there are many other small steps to reduce the loading time of a site, such as:
· minimize referrals
· Indicate the character encoding in the HTML document
· regularly delete the wrong contents
· avoid excessive use of plugins in the CMS
· limit the information collected in cookies
If so far you have not taken steps to increase the speed of your website; you should start now. In 2015, the Israeli technology company Radware published an infographic on the theme of the speed of loading in e-commerce and presented surprising results with e-commerce companies that are part of the world's top 100. About 50 percent of all commercial sites, for example, gave up compressing images posted online while twelve representatives found a loading time of three seconds. But a loading time of three seconds is considered as the maximum time before losing patience to the user.
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