Creative Ways To Boost Your Site Speed
In the following, we are going to be discussing a very important topic that’s “Creative ways to boost your site speed” and will discuss it thoroughly within the article. There are plenty of factors that influence how long every page on your web site takes to load, therefore there are many different steps you can take to increase your speed and improve user experience.
While all of those tips will assist you to improve your web site speed, you don’t need to do all of them today. In fact, if you’ve worked on your web site speed in the past, your web site might already be in line with some of these best practices. With that in mind, let’s get started.
Minimize HTTP Requests
According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different parts of the page, like images, stylesheets, and scripts. An HTTP request is made for every one of these elements, therefore the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render. The first step to minimizing your requests is to figure out how many your web site presently makes, to use as a benchmark.
If you use Google Chrome, you’ll be able to use the browser’s Developer Tools to see how many HTTP requests your web site makes. Right-click on the page you want to investigate and click “Inspect,” then click the “Network” tab. (If you don’t see the “Network” tab, you’ll need to expand the Developer Tools sidebar by dragging the left border to the left.)
The “Name” column shows all of the files on the page, the “Size” column shows the size of every file, and the “Time” column shows how long it takes to load each file. In the bottom left corner, you’ll also see the number of total requests the site makes. Reducing this number of requests will speed up your site, look through your files and see if any are unnecessary. You may not notice anything immediately, but some of them are likely prime candidates for combining — which we’ll get to in the next steps.
Minify and Combine Files
Now that you know how many requests your web site makes, you can get to work on reducing that number. The best place to get started is with your hypertext markup language, CSS, and JavaScript files. These are very vital files, as they determine your site’s appearance. They additionally add to the number of requests your web site makes each time a user visits it.
You can reduce this range by “minifying” and combining your files. This reduces the size of every file, as well as the total number of files. This is especially important if you use a template website builder. These make it simple to build a web site, however, they often create messy code that may slow your web site significantly. Minifying a file involves removing unnecessary formatting, whitespace, and code.
Since every unnecessary piece of code ads to the size of your page, it’s important that you eliminate extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation. This makes sure that your pages are as lean as possible. Combining files is exactly what it sounds like. If your web site runs multiple CSS and JavaScript files, you can combine them into one. There are many ways to minify and mix files, and if your web site runs on WordPress, plugins like WP Rocket make the method fairly easy.
If you have this plugin installed, go the “Static Files” tab and check the files you would like to minify and combine. This can include hypertext mark-up language, CSS, and JavaScript files, as well as Google Fonts. Then, hit “Save Changes” to complete the process. You can reload your page and look at Developer Tools once more to check the impact that your changes made. When it comes to your website, leaner is better. The fewer components on a page, the fewer HTTP requests a browser will need to make the page render — and the quicker it’ll load.
Use Asynchronous Loading For CSS And JavaScript Files
Once you’ve minified and combined a number of your files, you can also optimize the way that they load on your pages. Scripts like CSS and JavaScript will be loaded in 2 completely different ways: Synchronously or Asynchronously. If your scripts load synchronously, they load one at a time, in the order, they appear on the page. If your scripts load asynchronously, on the other hand, a number of them will load simultaneously or at the same time.
Loading files asynchronously will speed up your pages because once a browser loads a page, it moves from top to bottom. If it gets to a CSS or JavaScript file that’s not asynchronous, it will stop loading until it has fully loaded that particular file. If that very same file were asynchronous, the browser could continue loading other elements on the page at the same time.
Check the choices next to “Render-blocking CSS/JS BY using the same “Static Files” tab of the WP Rocket plugin. Click on the “Save Changes,” button and then test your website to ensure that everything loads correctly and in order.
Defer JavaScript Loading
Deferring a file suggests that preventing it from loading until after other parts have loaded. If you defer larger files, such as JavaScript, you need to make sure that the rest of your content can load without a delay and that too properly. If you have a WordPress web site, you can the WP Rocket plugin mentioned above to easily enable deferred JavaScript loading. Simply check the box next to the “Load JS files deferred,” option and then you’re good to go.
If you have an HTML site, you’ll need to place a call an external JavaScript file just before the < /body> tag.
Other things you can do are:
- Reduce server response time
- Minimize time to first byte
- You must choose the right hosting option for your needs
- Run a compression audit
- Enable compression
- Enable browser caching, etc.
