10 Ways To Speed Up Your Website [2016]

If you think that the speed at which your website loads is not important then think again. You will be surprised how crucial this simple fact is and how it can materially change the response that you have been receiving for your website.

Some recent studies indicate that a slowly loading website, even a 1 second delay leads to

• Over 10% fewer page views 
• More than 15% decrease in customer satisfaction 
• Close to 10% loss in conversions 

              Infact an average user expects a page to load in maximum 2 seconds. The loss of every second in the speed in which the website loads costs precious potential customers and can often be the reason for below satisfactory results to the website. Global online majors like Amazon and WalMart conducted major study in this field and came to the conclusion that every 100 millisecond improvement in the speed at which their site loaded meant a revenue increase of 1%. Walmart reportedly found an awe-inspiring 2% increase in conversions with every 1 second improvement in speed at which their site loaded and the faster the customers were able to access the more revenue they got.

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So here are some simple ways to speed up your website

1. Cut Down On Server Response Time: Whenever you are planning and designing a website, you must target a server response time that is less than 200 milliseconds. It will help if you use a web application monitoring solution and check for potential bottlenecks in your overall performance. It sure helps to evaluate the site’s speed and get some tips on how to boost the performance. Users could also use applications like Google’s Page Speed Tools to evaluate the performance and implement the best practices to further hasten it up. 
2. Benefit From Browser Caching: Technology has evolved to the point where you can install an expires header for a resource and the browser will store all those resources in its cache files. For example you can set up expires header like ‘all jpeg images’. This helps as this straight away enables the page to load faster the next time the user returns. This is because these images have been set in an expires header and the browser already has those in its memory or cached files. As a result of it a regular user or visitor to a site will find an incremental reduction in the time required for the site to load. 
3. Reduce Your HTTP Requests: It has been deduced by experts that maximum time is used up in loading the several small parts of the page like images, stylesheets, scripts, flashfile and many such parts. This is because a separate HTTP request is made for each of these sub elements. The more the number of on-page components, the longer it would take for the page to render. So the designing of the page needs to be such that simplifies the process and reduces the total number of these individual HTTP requests All you have to do is just streamline the number of elements on your page. Web designers can replace images with CSS to achieve this. They could also look at combining multiple stylesheets and get minimum possible elements on the page. Users could even look at reducing the overall number of scripts and assembling them all together at the bottom of the page. The fundamental rule in designing a website is that the leaner and sleeker it is, the better in terms of both looks and the speed in which the site loads. In a recent interview with CEO of Couponmachine.in (India’s largest coupon portal), their conversion rate has been increased to 24% after working on HTTP requests. Their case study started from Askmebazaar store page and ended with Zivame. They said, page loading time is also one of the biggest factors for conversions. They also said, every startup should work on site page optimization before going to off-page. 
4. Facilitate Compression: Many a time the page is slow because it is bulky and overall download takes a lot of time. Often creating high quality content results in creating in heavy and large pages which then also take equally long time to load. The side is close to 100kb or more and acts as a significant catalyst towards slowing the speed at which it loads. One simple way to address this problem is to compress or zip these files. Why this helps is because compression as the name suggests reduces the total bandwidth of the page and the total HTTP response. The Gzip format is the most commonly used method to achieve this end reduces the download time by nearly 70%. Gzip is a coomonly used format also because most browsers support it and it is a simple solution to speed up any site. 
5. Keep Alive Helps: The Keep Alive signal is also a key catalyst in speeding up the time required for a website to load. Generally sent at predefined intervals, it reroutes the link to a different path if there is no signal received. This is done on the assumption that no signal equals to the link being down. What this does is it helps a website tackle server related slowdown or errors. As it is an optional feature most host providers look at disabling it so websites should look at activating it on their own. 
6. The Content Delivery Network: Essentially what a CDN or a content delivery network means is a collection of web servers distributed across several locations for efficient delivery of content. Network proximity is generally the key decider in this case and based on proximity the overall server is assigned. For example, CDN helps a website to hop on to a server with the fewest network or the one with quickest response time. 
7. Cut Down On Redirects: The problem with redirects is that it trigger additional HTTP request and results in latency. Therefore it is important to keep only such redirects that are technically important or where you do not have an alternative solution. If you know a specific url is infamous for redirecting to other urls, avoid it on your site. Also look at how you can minimize the number of extra domains that issue redirects but do not serve any actual content that could add value to your website. 
8. Avoid Bad Requests: I am sure all of you are all too familiar with error 404 or 410. This is the technical name for broken links or wasteful requests. Fix this asap and pay special attention to images. You could use tools like online broken link checker or even the WordPress link checker could be adapted to monitor this for free and avoid frustrated customers or unsatisfied visitors to your site. 
9. DNS Lookup A Big No: Often it is noticed that DNS lookups take a significantly long time to look up the required IP address for a possible hostname and there is precious little that a browser can do till the look up is over. Therefore reducing the number of unique hostnames is directly proportional to the increased response time. A simple way to measure this is by using the Pingdom Tools. 
10. Image Optimisation: last but not the least, it is important to optimise your images. Often you might notice that images contain extra comments and even useless colours at times. This is a big no. It is important to reduce your image size to the minimum and you will see an instant improvement in your load speed. Saving an image in JPEG format also goes a long way in helping optimise it and also speeding up the loading time.