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6 Tips to Improve Your Website Performance

February 28, 2018 No Comments

Featured article by Evelina Adomaitytė, Independent Technology Author

evelin

We are living in times of instant updates, super fast internet, and same-day deliveries. In this day and age, people don’t wait too long for your website to load. If it doesn’t load within seconds, they won’t find a reason to stick around.

Take a look at this post to know how high load time can make users flee.

People are getting impatient and a slow loading website can affect your website’s performance; not to mention success drastically.

But how do you go about doing that?

Take a look at some tried and tested ways to improve your website’s performance.

1. Use a Content Delivery Network

This has to be one of the best and the most effective ways to speed-up your website’s load time substantially. This one step alone can save up to 60% of bandwidth and reduce the number of website requests by half.

A content delivery network basically hosts the site on several servers around the globe. In this way, the files are downloaded on a browser from a server that is located nearest to that country. It does not put too much load on just one server by accessing the file from multiple servers since the files are spread around the globe. CDNs also protect the site from the negative implications of sudden traffic spike and DDoS attacks.

2. Use caching plugin

If your website is based on WordPress, then you should try installing a caching plug-in like WP super cache or WP Total Cache to quickly cut down the page loading time. If you are using paid hosting services by WordPress, you can skip this step because their services come with built-in caching.

The plug-ins that we talked about in this point are available for free usage and happen to be really good at their job. Let it be known that these plug-ins do more than just caching the browser.

Yes, there are ways to do browser caching even if you do not have a plug-in, but it’s highly recommended especially to those who use a WordPress based website and are looking for ways to improve the page speed.

3. Add Expires headers

Every time a user loads a website on his browser, some cookies are stored in that particular user’s computer. So, the next time he/she tries to access the same website, the browser no longer needs to request the server for website access. It will instead use the cached cookies for this purpose thus saving the load time and cutting down server requests.

To make it easy for browser to differentiate whether to request a certain website files from the server to get a version of it from the browser cache, you should install Expires Headers. Of course, this trick does not apply to first time users who will be loading the site for the very first time.

These headers sever two purposes. Firstly they avoid the need to download the same file from the server twice. Secondly, the HTTP requests are also reduced which further helps in speeding-up the page load time.

4. Pick a good theme

Apparently you can’t just randomly go about picking themes. You need to be careful of picking the one that doesn’t take a toll on your website’s performance. Think of it as a preventive measure. A good theme can prevent many issues from happening.

A web designer could build an incredibly beautiful website but for a digital marketer a website that looks beautiful but doesn’t perform good SEO-wise can be frustrating.

Just like uploading heavy images, flashy content or lots of videos can slow down the website speed, the same way a theme that is too heavy can also slow down the page speed and shoo away a lot of visitors.

While going theme shopping, picking a minimalistic theme is always recommended. Make sure that it looks beautiful but at the same is not too heavy.

This post on the best free WordPress themes by Hostinger should help your browse through some of the finest ones out there.

5. Optimize Your Database By adding an Index

Most websites today maintain a database to store all kinds of information. Having a huge database is necessary but it can also impact how your website loads. One way to make sure your database doesn’t hinder the page speed is by adding indexes. Indexing helps database to locate information faster by narrowing down data to a couple hundred entries instead of scanning millions of records.

You can find several case studies on the internet where the most important pages of a website where taking as long as 2-10 seconds to load simply because of a database in the back that wasn’t indexed. After adding the index, the speed was reduced to 1 second.

If you too maintain a large database (this is mostly the case with ecommerce stores, news sites, and basically any kind of dynamic website), it is paramount that you index the DB.

6. Perform compression audits

It’s best for any website to house images, and files as small in size as possible but not at the expense of quality. When files are smaller, they load faster and that impacts how fast your website loads.

Instead of having bulky yet important files that are slow to load it’s best to compress them. If you want to get an idea about how running a compression audit would improve the site, you can use tools like GIDNetwork.

The following message will appear for all the images that are not compressed.

Conclusion

If you do a little research you will find tons of ways to improve the health and speed of your website. You can try a combination of different techniques to see which ones improve the most effective. However, the tips that we shared earlier are the most effective ones. Do try them and let us know how it improved your website’s loading speed. Also share if you have any tricks up your sleeves.

 

 

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