11 Great Optimization Tips and Tricks to Increase Website Speed
With the rampant growth of websites, it is very apprehensive that any website that is not working will be eliminated from the competition in the blink of an eye. Success may seem like a stretch for websites, which are not trimmed enough to load faster or can’t display content quickly. In addition to the use of multiple style sheets and JavaScript, it should also be noted that speed and performance come before anything else to ensure a great user experience. Here are some of the helpful tips that can help website owners get loyal and returning customers for their website.
1. Image optimization:
Images are an integral part of most websites, which if not properly optimized, can consume a significant amount of bandwidth and slow down the response of web pages. Therefore, images should be optimized rather than downsized. Some best practices are the use of web-friendly image formats like GIF, PNG, or the use of some tools, which can compress images without compromising their quality. Using responsive images can also be very helpful.
2. Redirect minimization:
Websites often take longer to load due to intrinsic redirects that generate additional HTTP requests. To keep these additional requests to a minimum, developers should aim to restrict the use of intermediate redirects.
For responsive websites, web pages are automatically redirected to mobile responsive versions without additional HTTP requests.
3. Reduction of DNS lookups:
The DNS lookup plays a vital role in downloading the web pages. Typically, DNS (Domain Name System) takes a long time to resolve the IP address of the host. It further slows down the browser’s response time as the browser waits for this background resolution process to complete completely.
It is good practice to split hostname components into at least four hostnames and that can dramatically reduce DNS lookup time.
4. HTTP request reduction:
Browsers spend most of their time sending HTTP requests to download various components of a web page, such as images, flash, styling scripts, etc. Therefore, a higher number of page components results in a longer load time for the web page.
It ensures design simplification, which can be achieved by reducing the number of page elements, using combined style sheets, compressed content, and placing style scripts last.
5. Hosting Separate Assets:
There are many elements on a web page that do not require server-side processing. These elements are images, CSS files, JavaScript and other graphical objects. Many web application developers do not want to host these components separately, and this does not affect performance either. However, this is a great way to ensure better server stability in the event of an unexpected spike in web traffic.
6. Optimized CSS and JavaScript:
Compressing the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript components in the web page can significantly improve the performance of the web page. There are many dedicated tools, which can be used to remove unnecessary characters like comment lines, block delimiters or white space from the script to compress the files. Online script compression services can also be of great help in optimizing HTML, CSS, and JS files.
7. Enabling browser caching:
On the first visit to a website, components of the web page, such as images, CSS and JavaScript files, are downloaded and cached on the user’s device. It makes subsequent web page visits faster by quickly loading them from cache instead of downloading them again. Therefore, the web page can be quickly displayed to users by taking advantage of the browser’s cache.
8. Optimized Web Font:
The use of custom web fonts, such as Google Fonts, is all the rage now and more than half of the websites use web fonts worldwide. Although these have certain advantages, they reduce the response time of web pages considerably, since browsers send additional HTTP requests to fetch them. Therefore, it is recommended to keep the use of custom fonts to a minimum and host them locally with Base64 encoding.
9.Precharge and preconnection:
Prefetching a domain name in the head section of the HTML code is a smart way to resolve domain names before the browser follows the link at load time.
Similarly, preconnect is a great way to initiate HTTP requests for DNS lookup, TLS negotiation, and TCP handshake before the browser sends the request to the servers. It reduces the total response time greatly.
10. Hot link protection:
Sometimes actively linking web content from various foreign sites reduces the performance of the site that actually owns the content. Therefore, Hotlink protection is the process of restricting other websites from using the contents of a site. It saves a lot of bandwidth by keeping external HTTP senders at bay.
11. Optimized Database:
It may have been placed last on the page, but it is just as important as the other methods in helping to optimize the website. The database can be tuned with regular maintenance where unused or redundant tables can be removed. For faster access to information, data can be properly indexed.
These are some of the most useful tips to modify your code or content, which promises an optimized web page. There are still many small and useful tricks to implement to get great results. As is always said of websites ‘The thinner the better’.