Speed demons: fast loading times to turn clicks into cash

HTTP requests are how browsers ask to view your website’s pages. Each request is made for each of your on-page elements.

The easiest way to reduce the number of HTTP requests is to not use any images, reduce image sizes, remove scripts and CSS.

However, this can impact the aesthetics of your website. Alternatively, you can reduce or combine your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

It’s best practice to place your JavaScript and CSS files in external files, as opposed to the code being inline.

When your browser loads a webpage, it will cache the external CSS and JS files – as opposed to having to load them – as it processes the HTML file.

Having external files, as opposed to inline code, will decrease rendering time and improve user experience.

Caching eases the strain on the server whenever a request for your site’s page is sent.

This allows the server to be able to handle more traffic, improving your website’s speed.

Image files can often be very large, so it can take a while for them to load – slowing down your page-load speed.

By compressing image files into formats such as JPG, you can significantly reduce the amount of time your images take to load without reducing the quality.

Website speed can be impacted by how far away a user is from your server. A CDN works by caching your website on a global server network.

The CDN will route the user’s request to their nearest server, reducing their page load times regardless of how far away they are from your main server.

Redirects can cause your pagesto load slowly, as they create more HTTP requests.

By avoiding redirects altogether, your website will be able to display content to the user much faster.

 

Dedicated servers give you full control over your server’s resources, unlike with shared hosting and VPS servers, which require you to share space and resources with other websites.

Having full control over your server means your website speed won’t be affected by spikes in website traffic on other websites that share your server.

Compressing your website files, to make them as small as they can be, will reduce the HTTP requests and decrease server response time.

This allows your website to load faster for the user.

 

‘Minifying’ files involves removing white or unnecessary space from your code.

Doing this will make the file smaller and therefore allow the code, and your webpage, to load faster.

 

Plugins require a lot of resources to run, which can slow down your page’s load speed.

Deleting unused or old plugins, particularly those that load their own JavaScript or CSS files, can dramatically reduce page load times as fewer files need to be downloaded for the page to finish rendering.