The Essentials Of Website Optimization
You just created a new website and typed the URL on your mobile phone. However, you find that it takes bit more time to load than the average loading time. Still, you are okay with it considering yourself to be temporarily on a 2G network. But wait! This may not always be true. Sometimes, several other factors can also influence the loading speed of your website. So, your website must be optimized in order to get most out of it. Indeed, there are vast tools that can be used to speed up your website. However, we discuss here the basic tools that are easy to implement and can bring you the surprising results.
So, let us take a quick look at few must-do tasks while optimising your website.
1.Using Google Website Optimiser Tools
Google’s own website optimization tool is very useful for beginners. It can test any element that exist as HTML code on a page including calls to action, fonts, headlines, a point of action assurances, product copy, product images, product reviews, and forms. It can also be used at multiple stages in the conversion funnel. These are:
- Analysis and Optimization with PageSpeed tools.
- Leverage Google’s Infrastructure Tool
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Reducing HTTP requests
According to a search engine, 80% of total page loading time is spent in downloading different parts of a page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can all be compressed to speed up their loading time. There are various resources on the web that minify these types of files. Packer, Minifler are few examples.
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Browser Caching Techniques
Browser caching stores cached versions of static resources. This speeds up page speed to a great extent and reduces server lag. To enable caching, you need to add the caching code to your .htaccess file. You can also use cache plugin for your convenience.
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Be Careful While Choosing Your Host
Another factor that can have an impact on speed is the type of server that is being used for hosting. Inexpensive servers can run your websites but it may lack quality and hence cost you with increased page loading time.
5.Making Use of CDN
Most of the blogs make use of the content delivery network(CDN). In online marketing using WordPress, it may sound surprising that some of the top bloggers make use of CDNs. CDN takes all static files on the website (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them quickly by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.
6.Image Optimization
Image size has a huge impact on web page loading. Hence, it’s very crucial to take care of images. A good idea is to avoid PNG and comparatively high-resolution images and use JPEG formats. There are a number of online image compression tools that compresses and at the same time maintain the quality of image.
7.Working on Javascript and CSS files
Moving JavaScript and CSS code to an external file is also a good idea. It makes the page load faster by making the HTML file smaller. External JavaScript and CSS files are downloaded to the client’s cache only once so further requests will be faster and the browser does not need to download the file again.
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Reducing DNS lookups
DNS lookups also take some time to look up the IP address for a hostname. The browser cannot do anything until the lookup is complete. Reducing the number of unique hostnames may also increase response time.
So, that is all about some primary optimisation techniques. When you are done with it, you can look forward to other optimising alternatives.