28 Jan
Did you know that a new website gets created every second? Right now, there are almost 2 billion websites online across the globe.
Yet out of all these, only about 200 million of them have constant activity.
There are many components that lead to a site’s demise. One major factor is the loading speed. If it takes your site’s pages too long to load, people will bounce out and Google’s algorithm will rank it lower than before.
Wondering how to make webpages load faster? The answer is to become better with your web design. Read on if you want to get the right digital marketing tips and improve page speed:
1. Resize Images
One of the first things you need to pay attention to is the images within your website. If your images are too big, you need to resize them to fit your website’s requirements. It isn’t about resizing using CSS or HTML–it’s about resizing the image within the server itself.
Once you’re done with the resizing, send it to the browser. For example, if your image resolution is at 4000 by 3000px, you might want to make it smaller. It’s especially important when you want to show smaller versions of the image in the same page.
Most websites neglect resizing images since their developers often overlook it. It’s especially the case when you change your page layouts. Without making a new image to fit your new dimensions, you end up with pages loading slowly.
2. Fix Broken Links and Other Site Errors
Often, your links become broken when you change the permalinks. It also happens when you migrate all your content to a new domain. If you’re savvy with web development, simple 301 redirects to the correct link can fix all these problems.
Before you start publishing your website, you need to test it for broken links. There are a lot of tools that you can use to do this. If you want something free and easy to use, the Google Webmasters Tool is a perfect solution.
Fixing these site errors will give improvements to your SEO. There are other errors that you might encounter as you debug your website. Fix these and you can expect for your loading page speeds to improve.
3. Lower HTTP Requests
Your website spends about 80% of its load time to download the various elements of your page like images. Each of those will need an HTTP request. What this means is that the more elements you have on your web page, the longer it takes for it to load.
To minimize these, you need to check the number of requests your website makes. Use the average as a benchmark. You can use the Google Chrome Developer’s Tools to check the number of HTTP requests.
Look through your files and check the unneeded ones. Delete them so your load time becomes faster.
4. Combine Files
The best parts to start looking for elements to combine or delete is within the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These are the files that make up your website’s appearance. They also determine the number of requests your website has whenever it’s visited by potential customers.
To clear up the clutter, you can always minify or combine your files. It helps in decreasing the size of your files and shave off their total number. This becomes a high-priority task when you’re using a template website builder.
The reason is the fact that, while it makes the website building easy, it might have a messy code. This can impact the speed of your website and make it load slower. Check for unnecessary whitespaces, formatting, and code bits and remove them.
Remember, even unnecessary codes will make your page size bigger. With this, you need to get the extra spaces, indentations, and line breaks out of it. This will make your pages cleaner and easier to load.
5. Use Asynchronous Loading for JavaScript and CSS Files
Minifying and combining files can help make your page load faster. However, it becomes more effective when you optimize their means of loading on your webpages. CSS and Java can either have a synchronous or asynchronous loading process.
If you use a synchronous process, each will load in the order they appear within your webpage. They get loaded one at a time. If your scripts have an asynchronous loading process, some elements will load at the same time.
This helps speed up your webpage because browsers load pages from top to bottom. Using synchronous processes will make the website stop loading until one file gets loaded in its entirety. Otherwise, it continues loading other elements in a seamless manner.
6. Defer JavaScript Loading
File deferring is a process that makes a file stop loading until other elements get loaded. Larger files like JavaScript need deferring since it allows other files to load faster. WordPress websites have tools like WP Rocket plugin to allow them to defer their JavaScript file.
If you’re using normal HTML, there are a lot of resources out there that allow you to make a code snippet. This is something you place before the Body tag to defer your JavaScript file. It’s easy to search for people who offer it for free.
Learn How to Make Webpages Load Faster Today!
With everyone’s attention spans decreasing, you need to know how to make your webpages load faster. Speed is important since people will most likely turn away if your website doesn’t load within three seconds.
Every person turned away is an opportunity wasted for your business to grow.
If you’re tech-savvy, you can use these simple tips to ensure that your website remains fast. There are other things you can do to improve speed. Don’t hesitate to reach out to experts if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Want more tips on how to make your webpages load faster? You can always contact us and ask for help since we have the right expertise and experience to deal with slow websites.