Different Ways To Speed Up Your Website
Having a website is exciting. It allows you, the website owner to virtually own a small but significant share of real estate in the expansive world wide web. Sharing your content and getting feedback from others can be a thrilling experience. Depending on the nature of the website, it could be inundated with too much media thus slowing it down upon web access. Where you choose to host your website can affect your website performance as well. Here are a few tips to consider to speed up your website.
Media Caching
A web page loaded with lots of images and videos generally takes a longer time to load than one which is not. To speed up loading time, you can configure your browser to enable caching. What this means is that the first time your web page loads, a copy of all the media on your page is stored on your local computer. The next time you access the same page, your browser references these media from your local cache instead of requesting the web server to resend the media over. The web page speed up will only be visible beyond the first-page access.
If your images and videos are of significant sizes, you can compress them first without compromising their quality before uploading them to your server. Many software applications exist that will optimize your media for you. If you run a Wordpress website, you can install these image optimizer plugins that will run through your entire website and compress your images for you in a single click. However, this process may take a while.
External Links
If your web page contains a lot of external links to other web pages, loading it will slow down the display of your page. Some website owners want to track visitor access to their pages, so they embed code to enable third-party websites to log visitor data. Some web pages embed advertising information provided by external sources to earn income when they are clicked. Others embed widgets and plugins to enhance the appearance of their pages that are supplied by third-party sources. If these external websites are down, for example, loading pages that link to them will cause a wait time that may be unacceptable to the visitor who may end up abandoning the site altogether.
Compile links to external websites by placing them on a separate page reserved for external links. If you have to include references to other websites, minimize them to less than five. Use only quality links that you know are stable and established. Even though you cannot guarantee a site's uptime, you can do some research to see if the site has a good history of availability.
Minification
If you run a website that utilizes a database such as Wordpress or Joomla, chances are your website will have a lot of pages. You can reduce the size of these pages through a process called minification which removes white space and other unnecessary characters and comments from your source code. Reducing the page size will speed up transmission over the web from server to client. Minification works on HTML, Javascript, PHP and CSS code. Trimming the size of your web pages will make your website lightweight and faster to load.
Web Host
There are other methods to increase the performance of your website including data transformation and website hosting on the cloud rather than on a shared hosting service. Cloud hosting enables you to choose the configuration of your web servers, their speed, performance, and their locations. Sharing a web server with other websites that are slow-running will affect your website performance as well. Spending a little more for a cloud hosting platform will be a great investment in the long run.
Being able to deploy one or more of these techniques that are under your control is a great relief as a webmaster. You will be able to test your site performance online to see immediate improvement. Better site performance leads to longer visitor retention and hopefully more frequent visitation.
