Faster website loading: Instructions

Websites should be user-friendly. To create organic search results, Google uses approximately 200 criteria. The top ranking positions are difficult to achieve. In all page categories, competition forces website operators to constantly improve. optimization to carry out the website.

The goal is to satisfy visitors and provide a positive experience. A crucial aspect of this is website loading times. If a website loads very slowly, visitors quickly lose patience. For you, this means losing visitors to your competitors.

1. OPTIMIZATION OF IMAGE SIZE AND IMAGE FORMATS

Images are usually large files, and loading them requires a lot of bandwidth. This slows down your website's loading time. Therefore, you should reduce the size of your images.

You should note that reducing the image size using HTML Only the display size is reduced, not the file size. Therefore, you should use external image editors, such as Photoshop, to resize images.

You can also use the following tools to compress images, graphics, and photos.

• smush.it
• SuperGIF
• JPRG & PNG Stripper
• Online Image Optimizers

Using standard image formats like JPG, PNG, or GIF will automatically help improve page load times.

2. OPTIMIZATION OF DEPENDENCES

To optimize dependencies, you can focus on the following three settings:

1. plugins

Plug-ins can significantly slow down page load times. However, certain plug-ins are unavoidable today, especially with regard to social media.

Check in each case whether a plug-in is necessary or whether an alternative can be used, such as a CMS (Content Management System) with integrated social plug-ins.

2. Scripts for visitor tracking

Being able to monitor and track visitor activity on your website is essential for making necessary adjustments. However, visitor tracking negatively impacts page load times. Therefore, use only one analytics tool. This could be WP Stats, for example, if you are using the Wordpress You can work with a CMS. Alternatively, you can also use the services of Google Analytics.

3. Content management systems

Content management systems (CMS) greatly simplify website management. Moreover, they are constantly being improved. Therefore, it is recommended to perform the offered CMS upgrades to stay up-to-date. However, you should be aware that the upgrade is not performed directly on your live site, in case complications arise. For this reason, it is advisable to perform the upgrades on a separate server and test them before going live. Installing the offered upgrades is worthwhile to achieve improved page load times.

3. AVOID INLINE JAVASCRIPT/CSS

Generally, it's advisable to store JavaScript and CSS in separate files. Once your page is accessed, the browser retrieves these files externally, resulting in reduced loading times for subsequent requests.

Furthermore, storing the files separately has the advantage of simplifying the management of website maintenance.

4. CACH OPTIMIZATION

Websites contain image, JavaScript, and CSS content that must be retrieved each time the page loads. However, if the cache is optimized, this content is stored in the browser. When the page is then accessed again, the data is not downloaded but retrieved directly from the cache. This reduces page load time.

To optimize the cache, you can use Expires headers for static content and Cache-Control headers for dynamic content. This makes images, style sheets, and script and Flash content cacheable, reducing the number of HTTP requests and thus page load times.

As the name suggests, Expires headers allow you to specify how long the content should remain cached.

Example: Expires: Wed, 20 Apr 2015 20:00:00 GMT

You can configure the same setting in the ExpiresDefault directive for Apache HTTP Server. This determines how long browsers can cache files, or when the new version of the page should be downloaded again.

Example: ExpiresDefault “access plus 15 years”

5. AVOID SCRIPTS THAT BLOCK PAGE RENDING

JavaScript files should only be placed at the end of the HTML body. Alternatively, you can use the `async` attribute. This enables asynchronous loading.

6. AVOID PAGE FORWARDING

Avoiding page redirects reduces HTTP usage and speeds up the server.

Broken links should definitely be avoided. Remove them from your site or replace them with current links.

7. ENCHANTING GZIP COMPRESSION

Zip files are well-known and popular. By compressing large files into zip files, you can easily send them via email. The same applies to Gzip files. The only difference is that the compressed content is your website's content. This saves bandwidth, speeds up downloads, and reduces loading times. The only additional effort required is to configure your server for decompression beforehand.

8. REDUCE HTTP REQUESTS

To reduce image requests, you can use CSS sprites. To do this, group the images into a single image file and show or hide the CSS elements `Background-Image` and `Background-Position`. You should also include the sprites in the buffered stylesheets. Finally, all JavaScript data should be in one file and all CSS data in another.

9. MINIFICATION OF JAVASCRIPT AND CSS

Minification is a process called variable renaming, which compresses page code. By reducing the code size, page load times are improved. You can use a tool like uglify.js for this process.

10. REDUCING COOKIE SIZE

Retrieving large amounts of data slows down page load times. If cookies are used, data is stored between requests. Reducing the size of these cookies decreases the amount of data transferred, resulting in faster page load times.

The goal is to limit yourself to only the cookies that are essential for the website's functionality. Individual cookies should be restricted as much as possible. However, this can be avoided. Below are 10 tips for optimizing your page load times: