Checking your website with various tools will give you an accurate idea of how fast your pages are loading. Most problems do not require extensive knowledge and skills to solve. However, some optimization actions, which are mostly done at the code level, should be delegated to professionals. To solve these kinds of problems and to implement these optimization actions you always need Professional Web Designing Consultants. But for minor issues and simple optimization, this article will help you a lot. Below we look at a typical list of problems that affect page load time and give tips on how to solve them.
Image Optimization to Speed up Your Website
On most websites, images are among the largest files and take up most of the download bandwidth. On average, images make up 45% of a page’s weight. They become a bottleneck that increases response time. Therefore, optimizing graphic content is a top priority for those who want to speed up their website’s performance. The most effective way to solve this problem is in three ways.
Compress photos without loss of quality
The following cloud services are proven helpers in this matter.
The compressor is an online service that allows you to compress images up to 10 MB for free. These compression can compress images up to 90%. There are different compression formats.
There are many popular CMS plugins that can be used to bulk optimize all images on a website – WP Smush Image Compression and Optimization, Prizm Image, CW Image Optimizer, etc.
Using web-friendly formats
These are formats such as WebP and JPEG-XR. Their main advantages are high quality with minimum weight. But there are also significant drawbacks, not all browsers support these formats yet, and not all search engines index them.
Implementation of the mechanism of “lazy loading” of images.
This method allows you to defer the loading of the image until the user scrolls through it. Using this method can significantly speed up the site and improve its performance. With plugins like A3 Lazy Load for WordPress, this option can be quickly implemented on CMS pages.
The lazy loading method is also used effectively for other elements. For example, if the user does not want the JavaScript file at the top of the page, it is a good idea to defer loading until it scrolls there. This allows the page to launch faster. You can do the same with videos or other files on the page.
Disable unnecessary plugins
One of the main advantages of CMS-based websites is the ability to install all kinds of plugins that extend the functionality of the web resource. As a result, many webmasters quickly lose focus. The prospect of making your website more functional and efficient in just a few clicks seems very tempting. But this phenomenon has a downside – for each plugin to work, server resources are required. Additional program modules increase the number of queries to the database, which significantly increases the page load time. If you find that too many plugins are slowing down your website, disable the ones you don’t need. The second solution to this problem is to switch to a tariff plan with a large number of dedicated resources.
Reducing the size of the HTML code
The size of the HTML code directly affects the page loading speed. The larger the files are, the more resources a browser needs to display the page. Optimally, the HTML code should not be larger than 100-200 kilobytes. In this case, optimization consists of removing all unnecessary things such as double spaces, line breaks, code comments, superfluous characters, etc.
There are two ways to do this, manually or with the help of special tools. The second method is more popular among webmasters. It requires no layout knowledge and can speed up the work considerably. Before optimizing documents, it is recommended to save them. Although there are no specific complaints about modern HTML compression services and plugins, it can’t hurt to take precautions.
Although by different tools and softwares it’s not very difficult to compress the code to speed up your website. But I most cases this can be tricky because of codes used in the website. We suggest you to take services by an Affordable SEO Consultants to done your all website related problems professionally.
Sitechecker services such as the aforementioned GTMetrix or Screaming Frog help find pages with extensive HTML code. For direct optimization, you can use different online tools. These tools will compress the code in seconds without compromising its functionality. For WordPress websites, the HTML code can be optimized with the popular plugins Better WordPress Minify and W3 Total Cache.
Configure client caching
When caching the client, the browser stores the files locally and no longer accesses them. When visiting previously visited pages, the browser does not send a request to the server every time but downloads the content locally from the cache. This mechanism makes the page load much faster, especially when it comes to images and CSS / Javascript files. Client caching can be configured via CMS plugins or via .htaccess file.
GZIP compression
Another caching mechanism is GZIP compression but at the server level. This technology minimizes the total amount of data that the server sends to the end-user. GZIP can reduce the size of websites and CSS by 50-70%, resulting in a noticeable reduction in load times.
Ways to enable GZIP compression
- Processing .htaccess. You can enable GZIP for a website by adding a code snippet to your webserver config file. With the right advice, it’s easy to do this yourself, but before doing so, you should contact your web host to agree on the most appropriate syntax.
- Use plugins. For CMS sites, you can enable GZIP compression using dedicated plugins. We recommend GZip Ninja Speed Compression addon for WordPress users.
In Joomla, the GZIP compression tool is provided by default in the website dashboard. To activate it, go to the system section System go to General settings and then go to Server.