You can make your website many times faster by making a few changes to it. Any website’s loading time greatly affects the user experience, search engine rankings, and overall website performance.
Slower loading of a website is mainly caused by unoptimized or large images, too many HTTP requests, a heavy website with no caching, bad web hosting service, getting limited resources when your website needs more of them, heavy JavaScript & CSS, or bad theme, etc. So this lesson will guide you on how you can reduce it on your own.
- Use A Fast Web Hosting Service: Some of the well-known hosting tycoons give you a very bad hosting service as they have a lot of customers and many new and old servers. So they offer old servers in cheap hosting and that affects the performance of the website. The quality of your web hosting service greatly affects the loading time of your website. If you want a faster website you must choose a fast web hosting or server with reliable performance. There are various hosting options you may select from such as cPanel, Hosting, Managed WordPress, Webhosting Plus, VPS, & Dedicated Servers.
- Optimize Images: Large and unoptimized images can significantly slow down any good website. To make your website load faster these images need to be compressed to reduce their size without disturbing their quality, that is called image optimization. It’s no rocket science, Managed WordPress users can easily do it with the help of a plugin. Others may use online tools, such as TinyPNG and Kraken.io, that let you optimize any image.
- Minimize HTTP Requests: This is the time we use dynamic websites mainly coded with PHP that has pages on the fly. So every time a user opens a web page, it makes a series of HTTP requests to images, JavaScript, CSS, etc to load the page. Minimizing the number of requests made by the browser can help you reduce the website’s loading time. Simply reduce the number of images, scripts, and stylesheets you have on the web page. Managed WordPress users can easily do that with the help of free plugins such as Jetpack, WP Super Minify, WP Super Cache, etc.
- Enable Image Lazy Load: This is also a method of minifying HTTP requests, this makes images load at the time when they come up on the screen especially when the user scrolls down. Hence, when a web page is opened only those images load whose place is visible on the screen, and other images load when the user scrolls down to them. Managed WordPress users can easily do that with the help of free plugins such as Jetpack, Lazy Loader, etc.
- Try A Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN is basically a network of servers that makes your website load faster by delivering content from a server that is geographically closer to the user. Managed WordPress users can easily implement it with free plugins such as Jetpack & CommonWP, etc.
- Enable Caching: Caching’s primary purpose is to increase the performance of the website by storing data locally to reduce the requests to the server. It helps to speed up your website by keeping the frequently accessed content locally in the web browser. Managed WordPress users can easily implement it with free plugins such as WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc.
- Minimize The Size Of JavaScript & CSS Files: Large JavaScript and CSS files also have an impact on the speed of your website. You can minimize the size of these files by removing unnecessary code from them to improve the loading time of your website. Managed WordPress users can easily implement it with free plugins such as WP Super Minify, etc.
- Use A Good Theme: A badly coded theme can also affect the loading time of your website so choose a fast-loading theme that is optimized for speed and performance. Managed WordPress users can do this by choosing a theme from a reliable author, the number of people using it, and testing it on their website from Appearance -> Themes -> Add New page.
In summary, reducing the loading time of your website can greatly improve user experience and website performance. By optimizing images, using a CDN, minimizing HTTP requests, enabling caching, using a fast web hosting service, minimizing JavaScript and CSS files, and using a fast-loading theme, you can significantly reduce the loading time of your website.